Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.
In my country we go to prison first and then become President.
It is safer that a bad man should not be accused, than that he should be acquitted.
It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.
Concepts of justice must have hands and feet to carry out justice in every case in the shortest possible time and the lowest possible cost. That is the challenge to every lawyer and judge in America.
He had drawn many a thousand of these rations in prisons and camps, and though he'd never had an opportunity to weight them on scales, and although, being a man of timid nature, he knew no way of standing up for his rights, he, like every other prisoner, had discovered long ago that honest weight was never to be found in the bread-cutting. There was short weight in every ration. The only point was how short. So every day you took a look to soothe your soul - today, maybe, they haven't snitched any.
No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.
He was a first-time nonviolent possible offender, ... And under the mandatory minimums, he was put in prison for 15 years. Not only does the punishment not fit the crime, but the mandatory minimums don't give judges any discretion to look at the background of the case, to read into the specifics of the case. I don't know a judge who really is in favor of the mandatory minimums.
Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future lives and crimes to society.
The mellow sweetness of pumpkin pie off a prison spoon is something you will never forget.
Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.
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.
Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.
Let us remember that justice must be observed even to the lowest.
Whatever you think of de Sade, he was a complex figure and we should not look for easy answers with him. He was, strangely perhaps, against the death penalty, and he was never put in prison for murders or anything like that.
The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.
Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.
Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.
Hanging was the worst use a man could be put to.
The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
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.
Trial by jury itself, instead of being a security to persons who are accused, shall be a delusion, a mockery, and a snare.
