To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.
History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.
Every crime has, in the moment of its perpetration, Its own avenging angel--dark misgiving, An ominous sinking at the inmost heart.
The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.
In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it.
We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.
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.
We are prisoners of ideas.
Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.
Law is merely the expression of the will of the strongest for the time being, and therefore laws have no fixity, but shift from generation to generation.
We have initiated programs for re-entry offenders, since some 500,000 to 600,000 offenders will come out of prison each year for the next three or four years. We want to have positive alternatives when they come back to the community.
When it comes to freedom, we are but prisoners of our own desires.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
The severest justice may not always be the best policy.
It is safer that a bad man should not be accused, than that he should be acquitted.
Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.
I was put into jail as I was going to the shoemaker's to get a shoe which was mended. When I was let out the next morning, I proceeded to finish my errand, and, having put on my mended shoe, joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct; and in half an hour -- for the horse was soon tackled -- was in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off, and then the State was nowhere to be seen.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky.
We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business.
There is a point at which even justice does injury.
In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.
A man who has no excuse for a crime, is indeed defenseless!
