When it comes to freedom, we are but prisoners of our own desires.
We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business.
He had drawn many a thousand of these rations in prisons and camps, and though he'd never had an opportunity to weight them on scales, and although, being a man of timid nature, he knew no way of standing up for his rights, he, like every other prisoner, had discovered long ago that honest weight was never to be found in the bread-cutting. There was short weight in every ration. The only point was how short. So every day you took a look to soothe your soul - today, maybe, they haven't snitched any.
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.
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?
I never told a victim story about my imprisonment. Instead, I told a transformation story - about how prison changed my outlook, about how I saw that communication, truth, and trust are at the heart of power.
The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They keep returning to the same things.
Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X came out of prison stronger.
It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.
I was put into jail as I was going to the shoemaker's to get a shoe which was mended. When I was let out the next morning, I proceeded to finish my errand, and, having put on my mended shoe, joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct; and in half an hour -- for the horse was soon tackled -- was in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off, and then the State was nowhere to be seen.
A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards, as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.
If we look at Houston, which is a very environmentally toxic place, we find that it has one of the highest levels of young men going to prison and also among the highest levels of illiteracy in the country.
The perfection of a thing consists in its essence; there are perfect criminals, as there are men of perfect probity.
Steal goods and you’ll go to prison, steal lands and you are a king.
Virtue pardons the wicked, as the sandal-tree perfumes the axe which strikes it.
In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.
A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.
Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.
In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.
It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their own kind.
Crime succeeds by sudden despatch; honest counsels gain vigor by delay.
Let us remember that justice must be observed even to the lowest.
Vices are not crimes.
Taught from infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.
