Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.
To seek the redress of grievances by going to law, is like sheep running for shelter to a bramble bush.
History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.
Well does Heaven have care that no man secures happiness by crime.
The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.
The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.
It is safer that a bad man should not be accused, than that he should be acquitted.
Reality becomes a prison to those who can’t get out of it.
The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.
Every crime has, in the moment of its perpetration, Its own avenging angel--dark misgiving, An ominous sinking at the inmost heart.
One of the problems that the marijuana reform movement consistently faces is that everyone wants to talk about what marijuana does, but no one ever wants to look at what marijuana prohibition does. Marijuana never kicks down your door in the middle of the night. Marijuana never locks up sick and dying people, does not suppress medical research, does not peek in bedroom windows.
No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, that can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.
The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.
Hanging was the worst use a man could be put to.
Experts and the educated elite have replaced what worked with what sounded good. Society was far more civilized before they took over our schools, prisons, welfare programs, police departments and courts. It's high time we ran these people out of our lives and went back to common sense.
One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.
Virtue pardons the wicked, as the sandal-tree perfumes the axe which strikes it.
Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.
If two people fight on the street, whose fault is it? Who is the criminal? It is the government’s responsibility because the government has not educated the people to not make mistakes. The people have inadequate, incompetent education, so they make mistakes! It is such a fraud.
They were being driven to a prison, through no fault of their own, in all probability for life. In comparison, how much easier it would be to walk to the gallows than to this tomb of living horrors!
In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.
It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.
If you treat prisoners well, they will be less angry, less inclined to violence inside prison, less likely to provoke violent actions by guards, less likely to have reason to file brutality lawsuits that cost taxpayers a bundle and waste administrators' time. And most important, well-treated prisoners will be less likely to leave prison angrier, more vicious and more inclined to criminal behavior than when they went in.
The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.
