There is no greater punishment of wickedness that that it is dissatisfied with itself and its deeds.
I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.
Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.
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.
The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business.
Taught from infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.
The difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion is the thickness of a prison walls.
No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.
The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.
Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.
On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break.
He who profits by a crime commits it.
No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, that can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.
We have initiated programs for re-entry offenders, since some 500,000 to 600,000 offenders will come out of prison each year for the next three or four years. We want to have positive alternatives when they come back to the community.
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.
The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.
Whatever is worthy to be loved for anything is worthy of preservation. A wise and dispassionate legislator, if any such should ever arise among men, will not condemn to death him who has done or is likely to do more service than injury to society. Blocks and gibbets are the nearest objects with legislators, and their business is never with hopes or with virtues.
It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.
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.
No man survives when freedom fails. The best men rot in filthy jails, and those who cry 'appease, appease' are hanged by those they tried to please.
I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.
Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.
Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrist? And what has he been after that they groan and shake their fists? And wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air? Oh they're taking him to prison for the colour of his hair.
It is not at the table, but in prison, that you learn who your true friends are.
