The public have more interest in the punishment of an injury than he who receives it.
If we look at Houston, which is a very environmentally toxic place, we find that it has one of the highest levels of young men going to prison and also among the highest levels of illiteracy in the country.
I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.
Women have worked hard; starved in prison; given of their time and lives that we might sit in the House of Commons and take part in the legislating of this country.
Law is merely the expression of the will of the strongest for the time being, and therefore laws have no fixity, but shift from generation to generation.
Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.
Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.
Steal goods and you’ll go to prison, steal lands and you are a king.
Women now have choices. They can be married, not married, have a job, not have a job, be married with children, unmarried with children. Men have the same choice we've always had: work, or prison.
When is conduct a crime, and when is a crime not a crime? When Somebody Up There -- a monarch, a dictator, a Pope, a legislator -- so decrees.
Every instance of a man's suffering the penalty of the law is an instance of the failure of that penalty in effecting its purpose, which is to deter.
We have our own system, ... and journalists in our system are not put in prison for embarrassing the government by revealing things the government might not wish to have revealed. The important thing is that our system, under which journalists can write without fear or favor, should continue.
Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.
The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.
It is true you cannot eat freedom and you cannot power machinery with democracy. But then neither can political prisoners turn on the light in the cells of a dictatorship.
A sick person is a prisoner.
Crimes generally punish themselves.
Trial by jury itself, instead of being a security to persons who are accused, shall be a delusion, a mockery, and a snare.
I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky.
Some laws of state aimed at curbing crime are even more criminal.
It is impossible to go through life without trust: That is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.
Three hundred years ago a prisoner condemned to the Tower of London carved on the wall of his cell this sentiment to keep up his spirits during his long imprisonment: “It is not adversity that kills, but the impatience with which we bear adversity.”
He who profits by a crime commits it.
To be at peace in crime! Ah, who can thus flatter himself.
