The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.
Some laws of state aimed at curbing crime are even more criminal.
Prison makes you a better judge of character. You pick up on people much faster.
When is conduct a crime, and when is a crime not a crime? When Somebody Up There -- a monarch, a dictator, a Pope, a legislator -- so decrees.
What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.
One of the problems that the marijuana reform movement consistently faces is that everyone wants to talk about what marijuana does, but no one ever wants to look at what marijuana prohibition does. Marijuana never kicks down your door in the middle of the night. Marijuana never locks up sick and dying people, does not suppress medical research, does not peek in bedroom windows.
Self is the only prison that can bind the soul.
The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.
There are dreadful punishments enacted against thieves; but it were much better to make such good provisions, by which every man might be put in a method how to live, and so to be preserved from the fatal necessity of stealing and dying for it.
In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.
The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.
What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor.
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.
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.
It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.
Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.
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.
Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.
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.
The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.
It is hard, but it is excellent, to find the right knowledge of when correction is necessary and when grace doth most avail.
One crime is everything; two nothing.
