Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.
Adversities such as being homeless and going to prison has made many people stronger.
I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice.
There are few better measures of the concern a society has for its individual members and its own well being than the way it handles criminals.
History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.
What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.
Here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to be to restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work.
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.
Virtue pardons the wicked, as the sandal-tree perfumes the axe which strikes it.
Written laws are like spiders' webs, and will, like them, only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful will easily break through them.
Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a God.
It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.
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.
The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.
To be at peace in crime! Ah, who can thus flatter himself.
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.
Any punishment that does not correct, that can merely rouse rebellion in whoever has to endure it, is a piece of gratuitous infamy which makes those who impose it more guilty in the eyes of humanity, good sense and reason, nay a hundred times more guilty than the victim on whom the punishment is inflicted.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
Trial by jury itself, instead of being a security to persons who are accused, shall be a delusion, a mockery, and a snare.
It is not at the table, but in prison, that you learn who your true friends are.
Crimes generally punish themselves.
What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor.
There is no greater punishment of wickedness that that it is dissatisfied with itself and its deeds.
The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.
We shall not yield to violence. We shall not be deprived of union freedoms. We shall never agree with sending people to prison for their convictions.
