Crime is a logical extension of the sort of behavior that often [is] considered perfectly respectable in legitimate business.
There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.
Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them.
The torment of human frustration, whatever its immediate cause, is the knowledge that the self is in prison, its vital force and 'mangled mind' leaking away in lonely, wasteful self-conflict.
There is no greater punishment of wickedness that that it is dissatisfied with itself and its deeds.
Extreme justice is extreme injustice.
Let us remember that justice must be observed even to the lowest.
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.
One man meets an infamous punishment for that crime which confers a diadem upon another.
A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.
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?
How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.
The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.
The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.
If you want total security, go to prison. There you’re fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking…is freedom.
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.
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.
He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it.
It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their own kind.
Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.
History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.
In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.
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.
Every instance of a man's suffering the penalty of the law is an instance of the failure of that penalty in effecting its purpose, which is to deter.
To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.