It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.
Steal goods and you’ll go to prison, steal lands and you are a king.
I can tell you this on a stack of Bibles: prisons are archaic, brutal, unregenerative, overcrowded hell holes where the inmates are treated like animals with absolutely not one humane thought given to what they are going to do once they are released. You're an animal in a cage and you're treated like one.
So justice while she winks at crimes, Stumbles on innocence sometimes.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.
The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.
We're in a war. People who blast some pot on a casual basis are guilty of treason.
I sometimes wish that people would put a little more emphasis upon the observance of the law than they do upon its enforcement.
The perfection of a thing consists in its essence; there are perfect criminals, as there are men of perfect probity.
They're not supposed to show prison films in prison. Especially ones that are about escaping.
Virtue pardons the wicked, as the sandal-tree perfumes the axe which strikes it.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
To trial bring her stolen charms, and let her prison be my arms.
I have been studying how I may compare this prison where I live unto the world; Shut up in the prison of their own consciences.
The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.
We have initiated programs for re-entry offenders, since some 500,000 to 600,000 offenders will come out of prison each year for the next three or four years. We want to have positive alternatives when they come back to the community.
One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.
Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.
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?
What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.
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.
History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.
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.
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.
