Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.
The uneven impact of actual enforcement measures tends to mirror and reinforce more general patterns of discrimination (along socioeconomic, racial and ethnic, sexual, and perhaps generational lines) within the society. As a consequence, such enforcement (ineffective as it may be in producing conformity) almost certainly reinforces feelings of alienation already prevalent within major segments of the population.
Man is condemned to be free.
There is no greater punishment of wickedness that that it is dissatisfied with itself and its deeds.
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.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
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.
It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.
There is no peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war - at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.
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.
What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.
To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.
We shall not yield to violence. We shall not be deprived of union freedoms. We shall never agree with sending people to prison for their convictions.
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!
If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.
Shyness is the prison of the heart.
Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.
We shall fight against them, throw them in prisons and destroy them.
To seek the redress of grievances by going to law, is like sheep running for shelter to a bramble bush.
We have initiated programs for re-entry offenders, since some 500,000 to 600,000 offenders will come out of prison each year for the next three or four years. We want to have positive alternatives when they come back to the community.
Vices are not crimes.
Faults of the head are punished in this world, those of the heart in another; but as most of our vices are compound, so also is their punishment.
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.
Crime succeeds by sudden despatch; honest counsels gain vigor by delay.
The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.
