No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.
The mellow sweetness of pumpkin pie off a prison spoon is something you will never forget.
Women have worked hard; starved in prison; given of their time and lives that we might sit in the House of Commons and take part in the legislating of this country.
The severest justice may not always be the best policy.
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 common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.
Governments have tried to stop crime through punishment throughout the ages, but crime continued in the past punishment remains. Crime can only be stopped through a preventive approach in the schools. You teach the students Transcendental Meditation, and right away they’ll begin using their full brain physiology sensible and they will not get sidetracked into wrong things.
Society has used the juvenile courts to create a caste system where there are throw-away people.
~James Bell
Wicked deeds are generally done, even with impunity, for the mere desire of occupation.
The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.
He who opens a school door, closes a prison.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.
To trial bring her stolen charms, and let her prison be my arms.
If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.
Written laws are like spiders' webs, and will, like them, only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful will easily break through them.
Whatever is worthy to be loved for anything is worthy of preservation. A wise and dispassionate legislator, if any such should ever arise among men, will not condemn to death him who has done or is likely to do more service than injury to society. Blocks and gibbets are the nearest objects with legislators, and their business is never with hopes or with virtues.
I can work for the Lord in or out of prison.
Crime succeeds by sudden despatch; honest counsels gain vigor by delay.
One crime is everything; two nothing.
The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
Self is the only prison that can bind the soul.
Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.
There is no greater punishment of wickedness that that it is dissatisfied with itself and its deeds.
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?
