How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.
Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.
To be at peace in crime! Ah, who can thus flatter himself.
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?
It is certain that the study of human psychology, if it were undertaken exclusively in prisons, would also lead to misrepresentation and absurd generalizations.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.
To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.
Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.
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.
We who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments.
Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
A variety in punishment is of utility, as well as a proportion.
Body is a home, a prison and a grave.
One man meets an infamous punishment for that crime which confers a diadem upon another.
I have been studying how I may compare This prison where I live unto the world; And, for because the world is populous, And here is not a creature but myself, I cannot do it. Yet I'll hammer it out.
If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.
He who profits by a crime commits it.
There is a point at which even justice does injury.
A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a God.
Crime succeeds by sudden despatch; honest counsels gain vigor by delay.
It is hard, but it is excellent, to find the right knowledge of when correction is necessary and when grace doth most avail.
If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.
