Extreme justice is extreme injustice.
The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.
Some laws of state aimed at curbing crime are even more criminal.
I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up...I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through, before they could get to be as free as I was.
Wherever any one is against his will, that is to him a prison.
When is conduct a crime, and when is a crime not a crime? When Somebody Up There -- a monarch, a dictator, a Pope, a legislator -- so decrees.
It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.
One man meets an infamous punishment for that crime which confers a diadem upon another.
The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.
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.
It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.
No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
I just remember that disturbing feeling of walking into that prison, the complete loss of privacy, the complete loss of stimulation, dignity.
It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.
The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.
America is the land of the second chance – and when the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life.
If you share the crime of your friend, you make it your own.
Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.
Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
The only difference between me and my fellow actors is that I've spent more time in jail.
Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them.
No crime has been without a precedent.
I don't like being famous - it is like a prison. And driving for Ferrari would make it far worse.
There are dreadful punishments enacted against thieves; but it were much better to make such good provisions, by which every man might be put in a method how to live, and so to be preserved from the fatal necessity of stealing and dying for it.
Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.
