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?
The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.
The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.
I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky.
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.
The mellow sweetness of pumpkin pie off a prison spoon is something you will never forget.
There are few better measures of the concern a society has for its individual members and its own well being than the way it handles criminals.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.
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.
There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.
The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.
Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.
How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.
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.
So justice while she winks at crimes, Stumbles on innocence sometimes.
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.
When it comes to freedom, we are but prisoners of our own desires.
The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.
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.
Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.
It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.
Pardon is the virtue of victory.
Hanging was the worst use a man could be put to.
Justice renders to every one his due.
It is not at the table, but in prison, that you learn who your true friends are.
