The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.
Pardon is the virtue of victory.
It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.
The public have more interest in the punishment of an injury than he who receives it.
To be at peace in crime! Ah, who can thus flatter himself.
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
No crime has been without a precedent.
Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
If two people fight on the street, whose fault is it? Who is the criminal? It is the government’s responsibility because the government has not educated the people to not make mistakes. The people have inadequate, incompetent education, so they make mistakes! It is such a fraud.
It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.
Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.
To try to raise a son from inside the prison walls is a very difficult thing. But I want to say to the world my son at 16 was the one who tried the most to get me out of prison.
~Jim Bakker
Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.
The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.
The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.
I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up...I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through, before they could get to be as free as I was.
No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
Extreme justice is extreme injustice.
It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.
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?
Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.
Fast closed with double grills And triple gates–the cell To wicked souls is hell; But to a mind that's innocent 'Tis only iron, wood and stone.
Let us remember that justice must be observed even to the lowest.
Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.
