Quotes

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.

Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.

Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.

The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business.

In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.

If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.

It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.

Virtue pardons the wicked, as the sandal-tree perfumes the axe which strikes it.

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.

It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.

Some laws of state aimed at curbing crime are even more criminal.

Do not lay on the multitude the blame that is due to a few.

Written laws are like spiders' webs, and will, like them, only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful will easily break through them.

Well does Heaven have care that no man secures happiness by crime.

There is a point at which even justice does injury.

There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.

Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached.

Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.

The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.

I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.

Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.

If you want total security, go to prison. There you’re fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking…is freedom.

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. Even if one takes every reefer madness allegation of the prohibitionists at face value, marijuana prohibition has done far more harm to far more people than marijuana ever could.

One man meets an infamous punishment for that crime which confers a diadem upon another.