Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached.
I sometimes wish that people would put a little more emphasis upon the observance of the law than they do upon its enforcement.
As we grow in wisdom, we pardon more freely.
Crimes generally punish themselves.
History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.
Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts.
It is true you cannot eat freedom and you cannot power machinery with democracy. But then neither can political prisoners turn on the light in the cells of a dictatorship.
The only effect of public punishment is to show the rabble how bravely it can be borne; and that every one who hath lost a toe-nail hath suffered worse.
If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.
The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.
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.
The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They keep returning to the same things.
No man should be judge in his own case.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
I can tell you this on a stack of Bibles: prisons are archaic, brutal, unregenerative, overcrowded hell holes where the inmates are treated like animals with absolutely not one humane thought given to what they are going to do once they are released. You're an animal in a cage and you're treated like one.
The severest justice may not always be the best policy.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky.
Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.
We shall not yield to violence. We shall not be deprived of union freedoms. We shall never agree with sending people to prison for their convictions.
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.
Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.
Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.
If two people fight on the street, whose fault is it? Who is the criminal? It is the government’s responsibility because the government has not educated the people to not make mistakes. The people have inadequate, incompetent education, so they make mistakes! It is such a fraud.
I existed in a world that never is - the prison of the mind.
