You utter a vow, or forge a signature, and you may find yourself bound for life to a monastery, a woman, or prison.
Well does Heaven have care that no man secures happiness by crime.
In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.
We have our own system, ... and journalists in our system are not put in prison for embarrassing the government by revealing things the government might not wish to have revealed. The important thing is that our system, under which journalists can write without fear or favor, should continue.
The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.
Man is condemned to be free.
I have never been contained except I made the prison.
Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.
Wherever any one is against his will, that is to him a prison.
America is the land of the second chance – and when the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life.
Virtue pardons the wicked, as the sandal-tree perfumes the axe which strikes it.
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.
Crime is a logical extension of the sort of behavior that often [is] considered perfectly respectable in legitimate business.
A variety in punishment is of utility, as well as a proportion.
While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.
I am an expert of electricity. My father occupied the chair of applied electricity at the state prison.
I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up...I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through, before they could get to be as free as I was.
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.
By noiselessly going to a prison a civil-resister ensures a calm atmosphere.
We're in a war. People who blast some pot on a casual basis are guilty of treason.
The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.
Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them.
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.
Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.
