Hanging was the worst use a man could be put to.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
We're in a war. People who blast some pot on a casual basis are guilty of treason.
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.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break.
Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.
As we grow in wisdom, we pardon more freely.
I can work for the Lord in or out of prison.
Pardon is the virtue of victory.
We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business.
Women now have choices. They can be married, not married, have a job, not have a job, be married with children, unmarried with children. Men have the same choice we've always had: work, or prison.
To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.
It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.
While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.
Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilization.
The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.
Three hundred years ago a prisoner condemned to the Tower of London carved on the wall of his cell this sentiment to keep up his spirits during his long imprisonment: “It is not adversity that kills, but the impatience with which we bear adversity.”
I am an expert of electricity. My father occupied the chair of applied electricity at the state prison.
Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.
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 power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.
Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached.
