Crimes generally punish themselves.
Vices are not crimes.
Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.
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?
Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.
Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.
I have been studying how I may compare This prison where I live unto the world; And, for because the world is populous, And here is not a creature but myself, I cannot do it. Yet I'll hammer it out.
Shyness is the prison of the heart.
The contagion of crime is like that of the plague. Criminals collected together corrupt each other; they are worse than ever when at the termination of their punishment they re-enter society.
Pardon is the virtue of victory.
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.
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.
Fear can be like a prison. It is, however, a self made prison. Many are imprisoned by fear. No one else can liberate them from this prison. Others may inspire them but they must liberate themselves.
No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.
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.
You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.
One crime has to be concealed by another.
If you share the crime of your friend, you make it your own.
Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.
One man meets an infamous punishment for that crime which confers a diadem upon another.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
The public have more interest in the punishment of an injury than he who receives it.
In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
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.
Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X came out of prison stronger.
