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.
One crime is everything; two nothing.
Federal prison, if you get any of it, you're going to have to do 85% of it. And the reason why I called it that is because I had a friend who got sent to the federal joint and his whole... it wasn't about him being in jail. He cried about the 85%.
The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.
How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.
It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.
Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrist? And what has he been after that they groan and shake their fists? And wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air? Oh they're taking him to prison for the colour of his hair.
No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.
Society has used the juvenile courts to create a caste system where there are throw-away people.
~James Bell
Well does Heaven have care that no man secures happiness by crime.
To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.
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.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
To try to raise a son from inside the prison walls is a very difficult thing. But I want to say to the world my son at 16 was the one who tried the most to get me out of prison.
~Jim Bakker
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?
Wherever any one is against his will, that is to him a prison.
Vices are not crimes.
The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.
Whatever you think of de Sade, he was a complex figure and we should not look for easy answers with him. He was, strangely perhaps, against the death penalty, and he was never put in prison for murders or anything like that.
It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.
We are prisoners of ideas.
Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.
We have our own system, ... and journalists in our system are not put in prison for embarrassing the government by revealing things the government might not wish to have revealed. The important thing is that our system, under which journalists can write without fear or favor, should continue.
In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.
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.
