Quotes

Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts.

It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.

No man should be judge in his own case.

I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.

They were being driven to a prison, through no fault of their own, in all probability for life. In comparison, how much easier it would be to walk to the gallows than to this tomb of living horrors!

Steal goods and you’ll go to prison, steal lands and you are a king.

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

It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.

To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.

Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

A man who has no excuse for a crime, is indeed defenseless!

The solution to our drug problem is not in incarceration.

Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.

It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.

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?

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

The perfection of a thing consists in its essence; there are perfect criminals, as there are men of perfect probity.

Federal prison, if you get any of it, you're going to have to do 85% of it. And the reason why I called it that is because I had a friend who got sent to the federal joint and his whole... it wasn't about him being in jail. He cried about the 85%.

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.

Society has used the juvenile courts to create a caste system where there are throw-away people.

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.

A variety in punishment is of utility, as well as a proportion.

Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.

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.

Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.