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.
Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.
Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.
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.
The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.
No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.
I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky.
It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.
To try to raise a son from inside the prison walls is a very difficult thing. But I want to say to the world my son at 16 was the one who tried the most to get me out of prison.
~Jim Bakker
I am an expert of electricity. My father occupied the chair of applied electricity at the state prison.
Hanging was the worst use a man could be put to.
The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.
And while God had work for Paul, he found him friends both in court and prison. Let persecutors send saints to prison, God can provide a keeper for their turn.
Steal goods and you’ll go to prison, steal lands and you are a king.
Man is condemned to be free.
Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached.
Justice renders to every one his due.
The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.
A man who has no excuse for a crime, is indeed defenseless!
I was in prison, and you came unto me. Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.
~(Jesus Christ) Matthew 25:36, 40
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.
Shyness is the prison of the heart.
The only effect of public punishment is to show the rabble how bravely it can be borne; and that every one who hath lost a toe-nail hath suffered worse.
The severest justice may not always be the best policy.
He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it.
