Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.
Well does Heaven have care that no man secures happiness by crime.
I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.
Vices are not crimes.
Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.
Extreme justice is extreme injustice.
The difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion is the thickness of a prison walls.
We shall fight against them, throw them in prisons and destroy them.
Trial by jury itself, instead of being a security to persons who are accused, shall be a delusion, a mockery, and a snare.
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.
Faults of the head are punished in this world, those of the heart in another; but as most of our vices are compound, so also is their punishment.
To be at peace in crime! Ah, who can thus flatter himself.
Shyness is the prison of the heart.
Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.
I just remember that disturbing feeling of walking into that prison, the complete loss of privacy, the complete loss of stimulation, dignity.
One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.
To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.
A variety in punishment is of utility, as well as a proportion.
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.
No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.
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.
Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a God.
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.
No crime has been without a precedent.
