The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.
Every instance of a man's suffering the penalty of the law is an instance of the failure of that penalty in effecting its purpose, which is to deter.
Taught from infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.
I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.
When you are younger you get blamed for crimes you never committed and when you're older you begin to get credit for virtues you never possessed. It evens itself out.
I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.
No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.
No crime has been without a precedent.
Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.
There are few better measures of the concern a society has for its individual members and its own well being than the way it handles criminals.
To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.
If two people fight on the street, whose fault is it? Who is the criminal? It is the government’s responsibility because the government has not educated the people to not make mistakes. The people have inadequate, incompetent education, so they make mistakes! It is such a fraud.
A variety in punishment is of utility, as well as a proportion.
To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.
It is impossible to go through life without trust: That is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.
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.”
If you treat prisoners well, they will be less angry, less inclined to violence inside prison, less likely to provoke violent actions by guards, less likely to have reason to file brutality lawsuits that cost taxpayers a bundle and waste administrators' time. And most important, well-treated prisoners will be less likely to leave prison angrier, more vicious and more inclined to criminal behavior than when they went in.
No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.
The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.
A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards, as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.
He was a first-time nonviolent possible offender, ... And under the mandatory minimums, he was put in prison for 15 years. Not only does the punishment not fit the crime, but the mandatory minimums don't give judges any discretion to look at the background of the case, to read into the specifics of the case. I don't know a judge who really is in favor of the mandatory minimums.
To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.
There is a point at which even justice does injury.
