Whatever is worthy to be loved for anything is worthy of preservation. A wise and dispassionate legislator, if any such should ever arise among men, will not condemn to death him who has done or is likely to do more service than injury to society. Blocks and gibbets are the nearest objects with legislators, and their business is never with hopes or with virtues.
Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.
Crime succeeds by sudden despatch; honest counsels gain vigor by delay.
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.
The only difference between me and my fellow actors is that I've spent more time in jail.
To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.
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.
There are few better measures of the concern a society has for its individual members and its own well being than the way it handles criminals.
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.
The best situation of all, and one frequently utilized, is for jails and prisons to allow volunteer ministers of all faiths to enter prisons and offer their services to the inmates who want them. That way, the religious needs of inmates are met but without government funds being spent.
They're not supposed to show prison films in prison. Especially ones that are about escaping.
Let us remember that justice must be observed even to the lowest.
America is the land of the second chance – and when the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life.
Virtue pardons the wicked, as the sandal-tree perfumes the axe which strikes it.
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 world itself is but a large prison, out of which some are daily led to execution.
It is safer that a bad man should not be accused, than that he should be acquitted.
No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
There is no peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war - at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.
A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.
I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.
The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.
The severest justice may not always be the best policy.
Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.
