Quotes

Faults of the head are punished in this world, those of the heart in another; but as most of our vices are compound, so also is their punishment.

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

Shyness is the prison of the heart.

Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.

It is certain that the study of human psychology, if it were undertaken exclusively in prisons, would also lead to misrepresentation and absurd generalizations.

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!

A sick person is a prisoner.

When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.

Every crime has, in the moment of its perpetration, Its own avenging angel--dark misgiving, An ominous sinking at the inmost heart.

The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.

Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.

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

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.

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

Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.

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

Any punishment that does not correct, that can merely rouse rebellion in whoever has to endure it, is a piece of gratuitous infamy which makes those who impose it more guilty in the eyes of humanity, good sense and reason, nay a hundred times more guilty than the victim on whom the punishment is inflicted.

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.

One of the problems that the marijuana reform movement consistently faces is that everyone wants to talk about what marijuana does, but no one ever wants to look at what marijuana prohibition does. Marijuana never kicks down your door in the middle of the night. Marijuana never locks up sick and dying people, does not suppress medical research, does not peek in bedroom windows. Even if one takes every reefer madness allegation of the prohibitionists at face value, marijuana prohibition has done far more harm to far more people than marijuana ever could.

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

Organized crime in America takes in over forty billion dollars a year. This is quite a profitable sum, especially when one considers that the Mafia spends very little for office supplies.

It is hard, but it is excellent, to find the right knowledge of when correction is necessary and when grace doth most avail.

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.

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

While crime is punished it yet increases.