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.
It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.
Do not lay on the multitude the blame that is due to a few.
Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.
I never told a victim story about my imprisonment. Instead, I told a transformation story - about how prison changed my outlook, about how I saw that communication, truth, and trust are at the heart of power.
Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X came out of prison stronger.
Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.
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?
In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.
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.
No man should be judge in his own case.
The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.
It is hard, but it is excellent, to find the right knowledge of when correction is necessary and when grace doth most avail.
History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.
We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business.
The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.
I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.
Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilization.
I can tell you this on a stack of Bibles: prisons are archaic, brutal, unregenerative, overcrowded hell holes where the inmates are treated like animals with absolutely not one humane thought given to what they are going to do once they are released. You're an animal in a cage and you're treated like one.
They're not supposed to show prison films in prison. Especially ones that are about escaping.
The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.
Concepts of justice must have hands and feet to carry out justice in every case in the shortest possible time and the lowest possible cost. That is the challenge to every lawyer and judge in America.
Pardon is the virtue of victory.
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.
