Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.
The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.
The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.
Pardon is the virtue of victory.
Care should be taken that the punishment does not exceed the guilt; and also that some men do not suffer for offenses for which others are not even indicted.
Written laws are like spiders' webs, and will, like them, only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful will easily break through them.
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?
Steal goods and you’ll go to prison, steal lands and you are a king.
Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.
What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.
We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business.
He who opens a school door, closes a prison.
The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.
Money will determine whether the accused goes to prison or walks out of the courtroom a free man.
The uneven impact of actual enforcement measures tends to mirror and reinforce more general patterns of discrimination (along socioeconomic, racial and ethnic, sexual, and perhaps generational lines) within the society. As a consequence, such enforcement (ineffective as it may be in producing conformity) almost certainly reinforces feelings of alienation already prevalent within major segments of the population.
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.
The severest justice may not always be the best policy.
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.
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.
The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.
In my country we go to prison first and then become President.
It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.
Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?
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.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.
