I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice.
Women now have choices. They can be married, not married, have a job, not have a job, be married with children, unmarried with children. Men have the same choice we've always had: work, or prison.
There is no greater punishment of wickedness that that it is dissatisfied with itself and its deeds.
We shall fight against them, throw them in prisons and destroy them.
Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.
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.
To trial bring her stolen charms, and let her prison be my arms.
Do not lay on the multitude the blame that is due to a few.
The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business.
Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached.
In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
There are dreadful punishments enacted against thieves; but it were much better to make such good provisions, by which every man might be put in a method how to live, and so to be preserved from the fatal necessity of stealing and dying for it.
Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.
The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.
I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.
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.
Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X came out of prison stronger.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.
No crime has been without a precedent.
Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.
Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.
