Crimes generally punish themselves.
In my country we go to prison first and then become President.
Wicked deeds are generally done, even with impunity, for the mere desire of occupation.
On average, drug prisoners spend more time in federal prison than rapists, who often get out on early release because of the overcrowding in prison caused by the Drug War.
They took away my money, my family, and my security. Why couldn't they destroy my ideas? We will question them in court tomorrow as we trigger The Revolution of all revolutions!
To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.
We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business.
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.
Since 1957, black people have experienced double-digit unemployment - in good times and bad times. Look at the population of African Americans in prison. They represent more than half the population of prisoners in the country, 55 percent of those on death row.
Vices are not crimes.
The uneven impact of actual enforcement measures tends to mirror and reinforce more general patterns of discrimination (along socioeconomic, racial and ethnic, sexual, and perhaps generational lines) within the society. As a consequence, such enforcement (ineffective as it may be in producing conformity) almost certainly reinforces feelings of alienation already prevalent within major segments of the population.
Self is the only prison that can bind the soul.
You utter a vow, or forge a signature, and you may find yourself bound for life to a monastery, a woman, or prison.
As we grow in wisdom, we pardon more freely.
The perfection of a thing consists in its essence; there are perfect criminals, as there are men of perfect probity.
The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.
The difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion is the thickness of a prison walls.
By noiselessly going to a prison a civil-resister ensures a calm atmosphere.
I was put into jail as I was going to the shoemaker's to get a shoe which was mended. When I was let out the next morning, I proceeded to finish my errand, and, having put on my mended shoe, joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct; and in half an hour -- for the horse was soon tackled -- was in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off, and then the State was nowhere to be seen.
Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.
Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.
Here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to be to restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work.
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.
Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.
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.
