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!
No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.
A sick person is a prisoner.
In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.
Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.
In my country we go to prison first and then become President.
Governments have tried to stop crime through punishment throughout the ages, but crime continued in the past punishment remains. Crime can only be stopped through a preventive approach in the schools. You teach the students Transcendental Meditation, and right away they’ll begin using their full brain physiology sensible and they will not get sidetracked into wrong things.
Pardon is the virtue of victory.
It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.
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.
Every crime has, in the moment of its perpetration, Its own avenging angel--dark misgiving, An ominous sinking at the inmost heart.
We're in a war. People who blast some pot on a casual basis are guilty of treason.
If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.
We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.
Well does Heaven have care that no man secures happiness by crime.
I am an expert of electricity. My father occupied the chair of applied electricity at the state prison.
It is not at the table, but in prison, that you learn who your true friends are.
The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.
To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.
Experts and the educated elite have replaced what worked with what sounded good. Society was far more civilized before they took over our schools, prisons, welfare programs, police departments and courts. It's high time we ran these people out of our lives and went back to common sense.
A variety in punishment is of utility, as well as a proportion.
It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.
Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.
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.
Three hundred years ago a prisoner condemned to the Tower of London carved on the wall of his cell this sentiment to keep up his spirits during his long imprisonment: “It is not adversity that kills, but the impatience with which we bear adversity.”
