It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.
To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.
No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.
I was in prison, and you came unto me. Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.
~(Jesus Christ) Matthew 25:36, 40
Crimes generally punish themselves.
Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.
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?
It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.
Steal goods and you’ll go to prison, steal lands and you are a king.
I can work for the Lord in or out of prison.
Three hundred years ago a prisoner condemned to the Tower of London carved on the wall of his cell this sentiment to keep up his spirits during his long imprisonment: “It is not adversity that kills, but the impatience with which we bear adversity.”
You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.
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.
We're in a war. People who blast some pot on a casual basis are guilty of treason.
In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.
Most people fancy themselves innocent of those crimes of which they cannot be convicted.
While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.
Here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to be to restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work.
We have initiated programs for re-entry offenders, since some 500,000 to 600,000 offenders will come out of prison each year for the next three or four years. We want to have positive alternatives when they come back to the community.
The world itself is but a large prison, out of which some are daily led to execution.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.
One crime is everything; two nothing.
If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.
There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.
The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.
