Law is merely the expression of the will of the strongest for the time being, and therefore laws have no fixity, but shift from generation to generation.
The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.
Organized crime in America takes in over forty billion dollars a year. This is quite a profitable sum, especially when one considers that the Mafia spends very little for office supplies.
To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.
It is true you cannot eat freedom and you cannot power machinery with democracy. But then neither can political prisoners turn on the light in the cells of a dictatorship.
Women now have choices. They can be married, not married, have a job, not have a job, be married with children, unmarried with children. Men have the same choice we've always had: work, or prison.
The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.
A variety in punishment is of utility, as well as a proportion.
I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky.
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.
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.
We're in a war. People who blast some pot on a casual basis are guilty of treason.
Adversities such as being homeless and going to prison has made many people stronger.
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!
Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts.
Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.
Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.
How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.
We shall fight against them, throw them in prisons and destroy them.
Man is condemned to be free.
Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.
In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.
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.
