Most people fancy themselves innocent of those crimes of which they cannot be convicted.
The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.
In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.
I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up...I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through, before they could get to be as free as I was.
The mellow sweetness of pumpkin pie off a prison spoon is something you will never forget.
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.
The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.
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.
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.
The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.
One of the problems that the marijuana reform movement consistently faces is that everyone wants to talk about what marijuana does, but no one ever wants to look at what marijuana prohibition does. Marijuana never kicks down your door in the middle of the night. Marijuana never locks up sick and dying people, does not suppress medical research, does not peek in bedroom windows.
Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
Money will determine whether the accused goes to prison or walks out of the courtroom a free man.
I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.
Steal goods and you’ll go to prison, steal lands and you are a king.
Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.
The best situation of all, and one frequently utilized, is for jails and prisons to allow volunteer ministers of all faiths to enter prisons and offer their services to the inmates who want them. That way, the religious needs of inmates are met but without government funds being spent.
Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.
Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our duty is to furnish it well.
Crime is a logical extension of the sort of behavior that often [is] considered perfectly respectable in legitimate business.
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.
Reality becomes a prison to those who can’t get out of it.
