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.
Vices are not crimes.
We are prisoners of ideas.
Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts.
He who profits by a crime commits it.
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.
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
He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it.
Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?
It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.
Well does Heaven have care that no man secures happiness by crime.
In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.
Concepts of justice must have hands and feet to carry out justice in every case in the shortest possible time and the lowest possible cost. That is the challenge to every lawyer and judge in America.
I know not whether laws be right, or whether laws be wrong; All that we know who lie in gaol is that the wall is strong; And that each day is like a year, a year whose days are long.
Any punishment that does not correct, that can merely rouse rebellion in whoever has to endure it, is a piece of gratuitous infamy which makes those who impose it more guilty in the eyes of humanity, good sense and reason, nay a hundred times more guilty than the victim on whom the punishment is inflicted.
And while God had work for Paul, he found him friends both in court and prison. Let persecutors send saints to prison, God can provide a keeper for their turn.
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.
One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.
America is the land of the second chance – and when the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life.
Trial by jury itself, instead of being a security to persons who are accused, shall be a delusion, a mockery, and a snare.
I have never been contained except I made the prison.
What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.
I can work for the Lord in or out of prison.
Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.
