Here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to be to restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work.
We shall fight against them, throw them in prisons and destroy them.
Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.
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.
Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.
Forgiveness, that noblest of all self-denial, is a virtue which he alone who can practise in himself can willingly believe in another.
The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.
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?
Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.
It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their own kind.
And while God had work for Paul, he found him friends both in court and prison. Let persecutors send saints to prison, God can provide a keeper for their turn.
The only difference between me and my fellow actors is that I've spent more time in jail.
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.
A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.
While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.
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.
On average, drug prisoners spend more time in federal prison than rapists, who often get out on early release because of the overcrowding in prison caused by the Drug War.
One crime is everything; two nothing.
A man who has no excuse for a crime, is indeed defenseless!
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
Money will determine whether the accused goes to prison or walks out of the courtroom a free man.
Extreme justice is extreme injustice.
To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.
I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky.
