The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.
No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, that can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.
No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.
I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky.
The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.
I can work for the Lord in or out of prison.
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.”
Adversities such as being homeless and going to prison has made many people stronger.
A variety in punishment is of utility, as well as a proportion.
So justice while she winks at crimes, Stumbles on innocence sometimes.
Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.
No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
Self is the only prison that can bind the soul.
Let us remember that justice must be observed even to the lowest.
Wherever any one is against his will, that is to him a prison.
It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.
He had drawn many a thousand of these rations in prisons and camps, and though he'd never had an opportunity to weight them on scales, and although, being a man of timid nature, he knew no way of standing up for his rights, he, like every other prisoner, had discovered long ago that honest weight was never to be found in the bread-cutting. There was short weight in every ration. The only point was how short. So every day you took a look to soothe your soul - today, maybe, they haven't snitched any.
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.
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.
Wicked deeds are generally done, even with impunity, for the mere desire of occupation.
The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.
To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.
It is true you cannot eat freedom and you cannot power machinery with democracy. But then neither can political prisoners turn on the light in the cells of a dictatorship.
Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our duty is to furnish it well.
I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice.
