Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.
Most people fancy themselves innocent of those crimes of which they cannot be convicted.
What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.
It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.
Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?
When you are younger you get blamed for crimes you never committed and when you're older you begin to get credit for virtues you never possessed. It evens itself out.
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.
I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.
Shyness is the prison of the heart.
Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.
Concepts of justice must have hands and feet to carry out justice in every case in the shortest possible time and the lowest possible cost. That is the challenge to every lawyer and judge in America.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
I don't like being famous - it is like a prison. And driving for Ferrari would make it far worse.
A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
Organized crime in America takes in over forty billion dollars a year. This is quite a profitable sum, especially when one considers that the Mafia spends very little for office supplies.
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 crime is everything; two nothing.
The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.
Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.
Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts.
It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.
Governments have tried to stop crime through punishment throughout the ages, but crime continued in the past punishment remains. Crime can only be stopped through a preventive approach in the schools. You teach the students Transcendental Meditation, and right away they’ll begin using their full brain physiology sensible and they will not get sidetracked into wrong things.
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.
