It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.
Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.
A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
There is no greater punishment of wickedness that that it is dissatisfied with itself and its deeds.
In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.
It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.
Steal goods and you’ll go to prison, steal lands and you are a king.
Nor stony tower, nor walls of beaten brass, Nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron, Can be retentive to the strength of spirit; But life, being weary of these worldly bars, Never lacks power to dismiss itself.
In jail a man has no personality. He is a minor disposal problem and a few entries on reports. Nobody cares who loves or hates him, what he looks like, what he did with his life. Nobody reacts to him unless he gives trouble. Nobody abuses him. All that is asked of him is that he go quietly to the right cell and remain quiet when he gets there. There is nothing to fight against, nothing to be mad at. The jailers are quiet men without animosity or sadism.
I am an expert of electricity. My father occupied the chair of applied electricity at the state prison.
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.
I just remember that disturbing feeling of walking into that prison, the complete loss of privacy, the complete loss of stimulation, dignity.
Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our duty is to furnish it well.
Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.
There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.
I have been studying how I may compare this prison where I live unto the world; Shut up in the prison of their own consciences.
Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.
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.
The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.
The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.
The contagion of crime is like that of the plague. Criminals collected together corrupt each other; they are worse than ever when at the termination of their punishment they re-enter society.
There are dreadful punishments enacted against thieves; but it were much better to make such good provisions, by which every man might be put in a method how to live, and so to be preserved from the fatal necessity of stealing and dying for it.
The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.
