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.
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.
The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They keep returning to the same things.
Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.
Justice renders to every one his due.
So justice while she winks at crimes, Stumbles on innocence sometimes.
Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.
We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business.
The perfection of a thing consists in its essence; there are perfect criminals, as there are men of perfect probity.
There is no greater punishment of wickedness that that it is dissatisfied with itself and its deeds.
One crime has to be concealed by another.
The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.
Written laws are like spiders' webs, and will, like them, only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful will easily break through them.
Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.
We're in a war. People who blast some pot on a casual basis are guilty of treason.
We are prisoners of ideas.
The world itself is but a large prison, out of which some are daily led to execution.
In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
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.
Women have worked hard; starved in prison; given of their time and lives that we might sit in the House of Commons and take part in the legislating of this country.
Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?
I just remember that disturbing feeling of walking into that prison, the complete loss of privacy, the complete loss of stimulation, dignity.
To seek the redress of grievances by going to law, is like sheep running for shelter to a bramble bush.
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!
It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their own kind.
