The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.
A man who has no excuse for a crime, is indeed defenseless!
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.
On average, drug prisoners spend more time in federal prison than rapists, who often get out on early release because of the overcrowding in prison caused by the Drug War.
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.
Vices are not crimes.
He was a first-time nonviolent possible offender, ... And under the mandatory minimums, he was put in prison for 15 years. Not only does the punishment not fit the crime, but the mandatory minimums don't give judges any discretion to look at the background of the case, to read into the specifics of the case. I don't know a judge who really is in favor of the mandatory minimums.
They took away my money, my family, and my security. Why couldn't they destroy my ideas? We will question them in court tomorrow as we trigger The Revolution of all revolutions!
It is safer that a bad man should not be accused, than that he should be acquitted.
Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.
A variety in punishment is of utility, as well as a proportion.
Show me the prison, Show me the jail, Show me the prisoner whose life has gone stale. And I'll show you a young man with so many reasons why And there, but for fortune, go you or I.
I don't like being famous - it is like a prison. And driving for Ferrari would make it far worse.
Man is condemned to be free.
Shyness is the prison of the heart.
We shall fight against them, throw them in prisons and destroy them.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.
Virtue pardons the wicked, as the sandal-tree perfumes the axe which strikes it.
To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.
Crime is a logical extension of the sort of behavior that often [is] considered perfectly respectable in legitimate business.
I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.
Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.
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.
Hanging was the worst use a man could be put to.
Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.
