If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.
It is safer that a bad man should not be accused, than that he should be acquitted.
Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.
Wherever any one is against his will, that is to him a prison.
The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.
No man survives when freedom fails. The best men rot in filthy jails, and those who cry 'appease, appease' are hanged by those they tried to please.
No man should be judge in his own case.
Well does Heaven have care that no man secures happiness by crime.
Some laws of state aimed at curbing crime are even more criminal.
The mellow sweetness of pumpkin pie off a prison spoon is something you will never forget.
Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached.
Society has used the juvenile courts to create a caste system where there are throw-away people.
~James Bell
Any punishment that does not correct, that can merely rouse rebellion in whoever has to endure it, is a piece of gratuitous infamy which makes those who impose it more guilty in the eyes of humanity, good sense and reason, nay a hundred times more guilty than the victim on whom the punishment is inflicted.
In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.
A man who has no excuse for a crime, is indeed defenseless!
A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.
Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.
Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.
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?
The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business.
Reality becomes a prison to those who can’t get out of it.
To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
To be at peace in crime! Ah, who can thus flatter himself.
To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.
