Quotes

To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.

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

The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.

Virtue pardons the wicked, as the sandal-tree perfumes the axe which strikes it.

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

Punishment, that is the justice for the unjust.

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!

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

Vices are not crimes.

Fear can be like a prison. It is, however, a self made prison. Many are imprisoned by fear. No one else can liberate them from this prison. Others may inspire them but they must liberate themselves.

If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.

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

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

I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice.

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

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

A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.

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?

The mellow sweetness of pumpkin pie off a prison spoon is something you will never forget.

It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their own kind.

Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilization.

Whatever is worthy to be loved for anything is worthy of preservation. A wise and dispassionate legislator, if any such should ever arise among men, will not condemn to death him who has done or is likely to do more service than injury to society. Blocks and gibbets are the nearest objects with legislators, and their business is never with hopes or with virtues.

He who profits by a crime commits it.

If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.

Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.