It is not at the table, but in prison, that you learn who your true friends are.
A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
The severest justice may not always be the best policy.
No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.
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.
One man meets an infamous punishment for that crime which confers a diadem upon another.
I never told a victim story about my imprisonment. Instead, I told a transformation story - about how prison changed my outlook, about how I saw that communication, truth, and trust are at the heart of power.
Society has used the juvenile courts to create a caste system where there are throw-away people.
~James Bell
Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.
There are few better measures of the concern a society has for its individual members and its own well being than the way it handles criminals.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them.
The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.
We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business.
There are dreadful punishments enacted against thieves; but it were much better to make such good provisions, by which every man might be put in a method how to live, and so to be preserved from the fatal necessity of stealing and dying for it.
In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.
To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.
I was put into jail as I was going to the shoemaker's to get a shoe which was mended. When I was let out the next morning, I proceeded to finish my errand, and, having put on my mended shoe, joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct; and in half an hour -- for the horse was soon tackled -- was in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off, and then the State was nowhere to be seen.
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.
The torment of human frustration, whatever its immediate cause, is the knowledge that the self is in prison, its vital force and 'mangled mind' leaking away in lonely, wasteful self-conflict.
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.
The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.
We're in a war. People who blast some pot on a casual basis are guilty of treason.
Experts and the educated elite have replaced what worked with what sounded good. Society was far more civilized before they took over our schools, prisons, welfare programs, police departments and courts. It's high time we ran these people out of our lives and went back to common sense.
