The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.
Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.
Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrist? And what has he been after that they groan and shake their fists? And wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air? Oh they're taking him to prison for the colour of his hair.
Vices are not crimes.
The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.
No man should be judge in his own case.
The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business.
Steal goods and you’ll go to prison, steal lands and you are a king.
A variety in punishment is of utility, as well as a proportion.
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.
There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.
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?
Money will determine whether the accused goes to prison or walks out of the courtroom a free man.
They're not supposed to show prison films in prison. Especially ones that are about escaping.
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.
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.
In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
There is no greater punishment of wickedness that that it is dissatisfied with itself and its deeds.
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.
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.
One crime is everything; two nothing.
It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.
Three hundred years ago a prisoner condemned to the Tower of London carved on the wall of his cell this sentiment to keep up his spirits during his long imprisonment: “It is not adversity that kills, but the impatience with which we bear adversity.”
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They keep returning to the same things.
