To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.
They were being driven to a prison, through no fault of their own, in all probability for life. In comparison, how much easier it would be to walk to the gallows than to this tomb of living horrors!
There's no greater threat to our independence, to our cherished freedoms and personal liberties than the continual, relentless injection of these insidious poisons into our system. We must decide whether we cherish independence from drugs, without which there is no freedom.
Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
Society has used the juvenile courts to create a caste system where there are throw-away people.
~James Bell
One of the problems that the marijuana reform movement consistently faces is that everyone wants to talk about what marijuana does, but no one ever wants to look at what marijuana prohibition does. Marijuana never kicks down your door in the middle of the night. Marijuana never locks up sick and dying people, does not suppress medical research, does not peek in bedroom windows.
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.
While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.
No man survives when freedom fails. The best men rot in filthy jails, and those who cry 'appease, appease' are hanged by those they tried to please.
Well does Heaven have care that no man secures happiness by crime.
Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.
It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.
No man should be judge in his own case.
You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.
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.
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.
The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business.
Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.
In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.
A variety in punishment is of utility, as well as a proportion.
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.
Reality becomes a prison to those who can’t get out of it.
I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky.
No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.
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?
