Quotes

A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.

Vices are not crimes.

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.

Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.

No man should be judge in his own case.

The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.

When is conduct a crime, and when is a crime not a crime? When Somebody Up There -- a monarch, a dictator, a Pope, a legislator -- so decrees.

It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their own kind.

Concepts of justice must have hands and feet to carry out justice in every case in the shortest possible time and the lowest possible cost. That is the challenge to every lawyer and judge in America.

Adversities such as being homeless and going to prison has made many people stronger.

In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.

Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.

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.

Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.

Fast closed with double grills
And triple gates – the cell
To wicked souls is hell;
But to a mind that's innocent
'Tis only iron, wood and stone.

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

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

Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.

Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.

Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future lives and crimes to society.

Crime succeeds by sudden despatch; honest counsels gain vigor by delay.

In prison, you get the chance to see who really loves you.

A country is in a bad state, which is governed only by laws; because a thousand things occur for which laws cannot provide, and where authority ought to interpose.

One man meets an infamous punishment for that crime which confers a diadem upon another.

The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.