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.
The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.
Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.
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.
To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.
Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.
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 English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.
One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.
There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.
Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a God.
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.
While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.
Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.
Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.
Let us remember that justice must be observed even to the lowest.
Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.
No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, that can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.
How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.
Since 1957, black people have experienced double-digit unemployment - in good times and bad times. Look at the population of African Americans in prison. They represent more than half the population of prisoners in the country, 55 percent of those on death row.
I don't like being famous - it is like a prison. And driving for Ferrari would make it far worse.
Well does Heaven have care that no man secures happiness by crime.
Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?
A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.
Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.
