You utter a vow, or forge a signature, and you may find yourself bound for life to a monastery, a woman, or prison.
There is no peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war - at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.
The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.
If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.
The world itself is but a large prison, out of which some are daily led to execution.
Virtue pardons the wicked, as the sandal-tree perfumes the axe which strikes it.
There's no greater threat to our independence, to our cherished freedoms and personal liberties than the continual, relentless injection of these insidious poisons into our system. We must decide whether we cherish independence from drugs, without which there is no freedom.
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.
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.
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.
On average, drug prisoners spend more time in federal prison than rapists, who often get out on early release because of the overcrowding in prison caused by the Drug War.
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.
A man who has no excuse for a crime, is indeed defenseless!
I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice.
Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.
Most people fancy themselves innocent of those crimes of which they cannot be convicted.
Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.
Crime is a logical extension of the sort of behavior that often [is] considered perfectly respectable in legitimate business.
I know not whether laws be right, or whether laws be wrong; All that we know who lie in gaol is that the wall is strong; And that each day is like a year, a year whose days are long.
I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.
It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.
No crime has been without a precedent.
Forgiveness, that noblest of all self-denial, is a virtue which he alone who can practise in himself can willingly believe in another.
If we look at Houston, which is a very environmentally toxic place, we find that it has one of the highest levels of young men going to prison and also among the highest levels of illiteracy in the country.
