Quotes

The severest justice may not always be the best policy.

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.

On average, drug prisoners spend more time in federal prison than rapists, who often get out on early release because of the overcrowding in prison caused by the Drug War.

On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break.

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

If it's near dinner-time, the foreman takes out his watch when the jury has retired, and says: "Dear me, gentlemen, ten minutes to five, I declare! I dine at five, gentlemen." "So do I," says everybody else, except two men who ought to have dined at three and seem more than half disposed to stand out in consequence. The foreman smiles, and puts up his watch:--"Well, gentlemen, what do we say, plaintiff or defendant, gentlemen?

When it comes to freedom, we are but prisoners of our own desires.

I have been studying how I may compare this prison where I live unto the world; Shut up in the prison of their own consciences.

There's no greater threat to our independence, to our cherished freedoms and personal liberties than the continual, relentless injection of these insidious poisons into our system. We must decide whether we cherish independence from drugs, without which there is no freedom.

The public have more interest in the punishment of an injury than he who receives it.

I existed in a world that never is - the prison of the mind.

If you share the crime of your friend, you make it your own.

Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.

He had drawn many a thousand of these rations in prisons and camps, and though he'd never had an opportunity to weight them on scales, and although, being a man of timid nature, he knew no way of standing up for his rights, he, like every other prisoner, had discovered long ago that honest weight was never to be found in the bread-cutting. There was short weight in every ration. The only point was how short. So every day you took a look to soothe your soul - today, maybe, they haven't snitched any.

Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our duty is to furnish it well.

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

I sometimes wish that people would put a little more emphasis upon the observance of the law than they do upon its enforcement.

The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They keep returning to the same things.

To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.

The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business.

Three hundred years ago a prisoner condemned to the Tower of London carved on the wall of his cell this sentiment to keep up his spirits during his long imprisonment: “It is not adversity that kills, but the impatience with which we bear adversity.”

The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.

He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it.

I can tell you this on a stack of Bibles: prisons are archaic, brutal, unregenerative, overcrowded hell holes where the inmates are treated like animals with absolutely not one humane thought given to what they are going to do once they are released. You're an animal in a cage and you're treated like one.