To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.
A country is in a bad state, which is governed only by laws; because a thousand things occur for which laws cannot provide, and where authority ought to interpose.
Most people fancy themselves innocent of those crimes of which they cannot be convicted.
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.
I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up...I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through, before they could get to be as free as I was.
Society has used the juvenile courts to create a caste system where there are throw-away people.
~James Bell
Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them.
The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.
We're in a war. People who blast some pot on a casual basis are guilty of treason.
Money will determine whether the accused goes to prison or walks out of the courtroom a free man.
Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.
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.
Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.
In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.
The number of laws is constantly growing in all countries and, owing to this, what is called crime is very often not a crime at all, for it contains no element of violence or harm.
He had drawn many a thousand of these rations in prisons and camps, and though he'd never had an opportunity to weight them on scales, and although, being a man of timid nature, he knew no way of standing up for his rights, he, like every other prisoner, had discovered long ago that honest weight was never to be found in the bread-cutting. There was short weight in every ration. The only point was how short. So every day you took a look to soothe your soul - today, maybe, they haven't snitched any.
We shall fight against them, throw them in prisons and destroy them.
No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
The contagion of crime is like that of the plague. Criminals collected together corrupt each other; they are worse than ever when at the termination of their punishment they re-enter society.
The difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion is the thickness of a prison walls.
No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.
The perfection of a thing consists in its essence; there are perfect criminals, as there are men of perfect probity.
Crime succeeds by sudden despatch; honest counsels gain vigor by delay.
While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.
