Quotes

Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached.

Pardon is the virtue of victory.

A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards, as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.

So justice while she winks at crimes, Stumbles on innocence sometimes.

Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.

Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.

The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.

The difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion is the thickness of a prison walls.

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 object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.

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.

To be at peace in crime! Ah, who can thus flatter himself.

The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.

Well does Heaven have care that no man secures happiness by crime.

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.

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.

I was put into jail as I was going to the shoemaker's to get a shoe which was mended. When I was let out the next morning, I proceeded to finish my errand, and, having put on my mended shoe, joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct; and in half an hour -- for the horse was soon tackled -- was in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off, and then the State was nowhere to be seen.

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!

He who opens a school door, closes a prison.

Do not lay on the multitude the blame that is due to a few.

The contagion of crime is like that of the plague. Criminals collected together corrupt each other; they are worse than ever when at the termination of their punishment they re-enter society.

One crime is everything; two nothing.

It is impossible to go through life without trust: That is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.

What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.

The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.