What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.
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?
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.
The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.
A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.
Hanging was the worst use a man could be put to.
History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.
We are prisoners of ideas.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it.
The uneven impact of actual enforcement measures tends to mirror and reinforce more general patterns of discrimination (along socioeconomic, racial and ethnic, sexual, and perhaps generational lines) within the society. As a consequence, such enforcement (ineffective as it may be in producing conformity) almost certainly reinforces feelings of alienation already prevalent within major segments of the population.
Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached.
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.
I existed in a world that never is - the prison of the mind.
There is no peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war - at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.
In my country we go to prison first and then become President.
Fear can be like a prison. It is, however, a self made prison. Many are imprisoned by fear. No one else can liberate them from this prison. Others may inspire them but they must liberate themselves.
As we grow in wisdom, we pardon more freely.
A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards, as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.
It is safer that a bad man should not be accused, than that he should be acquitted.
The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.
We're in a war. People who blast some pot on a casual basis are guilty of treason.
