Quotes

There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.

Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.

The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.

A country is in a bad state, which is governed only by laws; because a thousand things occur for which laws cannot provide, and where authority ought to interpose.

We are prisoners of ideas.

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

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.

It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.

We who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments.

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.

Trial by jury itself, instead of being a security to persons who are accused, shall be a delusion, a mockery, and a snare.

Prosecution I have managed to avoid; but I have been arrested, charged in a police court, have refused to be bound over, and thereupon have been unconditionally released - to my great regret; for I have always wanted to know what going to prison was like.

Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.

It is safer that a bad man should not be accused, than that he should be acquitted.

Wicked deeds are generally done, even with impunity, for the mere desire of occupation.

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

No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, that can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.

He was a first-time nonviolent possible offender, ... And under the mandatory minimums, he was put in prison for 15 years. Not only does the punishment not fit the crime, but the mandatory minimums don't give judges any discretion to look at the background of the case, to read into the specifics of the case. I don't know a judge who really is in favor of the mandatory minimums.

Self is the only prison that can bind the soul.

No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.

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

He who profits by a crime commits it.

Do not lay on the multitude the blame that is due to a few.

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

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.