Quotes

The difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion is the thickness of a prison walls.

Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.

Before we can diminish our sufferings from the ill-controlled aggressive assaults of fellow citizens, we must renounce the philosophy of punishment, the obsolete, vengeful penal attitude. In its place we would seek a comprehensive, constructive social attitude - therapeutic in some instances, restraining in some instances, but preventive in its total social impact. In the last analysis this becomes a question of personal morals and values. No matter how glorified or how piously disguised, vengeance as a human motive must be personally repudiated by each and every one of us.

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.

The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.

Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future lives and crimes to society.

It is impossible to go through life without trust: That is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.

To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.

He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it.

If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.

Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.

He who opens a school door, closes a prison.

One crime is everything; two nothing.

When it comes to freedom, we are but prisoners of our own desires.

Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.

Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X came out of prison stronger.

In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.

Federal prison, if you get any of it, you're going to have to do 85% of it. And the reason why I called it that is because I had a friend who got sent to the federal joint and his whole... it wasn't about him being in jail. He cried about the 85%.

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.

It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.

Experts and the educated elite have replaced what worked with what sounded good. Society was far more civilized before they took over our schools, prisons, welfare programs, police departments and courts. It's high time we ran these people out of our lives and went back to common sense.

Vices are not crimes.

They're not supposed to show prison films in prison. Especially ones that are about escaping.

Show me the prison, Show me the jail, Show me the prisoner whose life has gone stale. And I'll show you a young man with so many reasons why And there, but for fortune, go you or I.

The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.