The difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion is the thickness of a prison walls.
If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.
Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.
Prison makes you a better judge of character. You pick up on people much faster.
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.
The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.
The only effect of public punishment is to show the rabble how bravely it can be borne; and that every one who hath lost a toe-nail hath suffered worse.
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?
One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.
Justice renders to every one his due.
Whatever you think of de Sade, he was a complex figure and we should not look for easy answers with him. He was, strangely perhaps, against the death penalty, and he was never put in prison for murders or anything like that.
He who opens a school door, closes a prison.
The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.
Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.
Pardon is the virtue of victory.
Extreme justice is extreme injustice.
To be at peace in crime! Ah, who can thus flatter himself.
I know not whether laws be right, or whether laws be wrong; All that we know who lie in gaol is that the wall is strong; And that each day is like a year, a year whose days are long.
Do not lay on the multitude the blame that is due to a few.
One man meets an infamous punishment for that crime which confers a diadem upon another.
Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.
I just remember that disturbing feeling of walking into that prison, the complete loss of privacy, the complete loss of stimulation, dignity.
Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.
If you share the crime of your friend, you make it your own.
