While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.
By noiselessly going to a prison a civil-resister ensures a calm atmosphere.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
While crime is punished it yet increases.
Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.
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.
Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached.
Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.
The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.
The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.
Justice renders to every one his due.
The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.
I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.
Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.
There is a point at which even justice does injury.
He was a first-time nonviolent possible offender, ... And under the mandatory minimums, he was put in prison for 15 years. Not only does the punishment not fit the crime, but the mandatory minimums don't give judges any discretion to look at the background of the case, to read into the specifics of the case. I don't know a judge who really is in favor of the mandatory minimums.
I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.
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 make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.
It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.
Show me the prison, Show me the jail, Show me the prisoner whose life has gone stale. And I'll show you a young man with so many reasons why And there, but for fortune, go you or I.
