No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.
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.
We have initiated programs for re-entry offenders, since some 500,000 to 600,000 offenders will come out of prison each year for the next three or four years. We want to have positive alternatives when they come back to the community.
So justice while she winks at crimes, Stumbles on innocence sometimes.
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.
We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business.
The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.
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.
Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?
We are prisoners of ideas.
Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.
The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.
We who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments.
He who opens a school door, closes a prison.
If you share the crime of your friend, you make it your own.
Most people fancy themselves innocent of those crimes of which they cannot be convicted.
The torment of human frustration, whatever its immediate cause, is the knowledge that the self is in prison, its vital force and 'mangled mind' leaking away in lonely, wasteful self-conflict.
Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.
Pardon is the virtue of victory.
It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.
To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.
Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrist? And what has he been after that they groan and shake their fists? And wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air? Oh they're taking him to prison for the colour of his hair.
I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.
The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.
We're in a war. People who blast some pot on a casual basis are guilty of treason.
