The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business.
The severest justice may not always be the best policy.
So justice while she winks at crimes, Stumbles on innocence sometimes.
Prison, dungeons, blessed places where evil is impossible because they are the crossroads of all the evil in the world. One cannot commit evil in hell.
Every instance of a man's suffering the penalty of the law is an instance of the failure of that penalty in effecting its purpose, which is to deter.
The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.
To be at peace in crime! Ah, who can thus flatter himself.
Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.
I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.
Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.
Care should be taken that the punishment does not exceed the guilt; and also that some men do not suffer for offenses for which others are not even indicted.
Federal prison, if you get any of it, you're going to have to do 85% of it. And the reason why I called it that is because I had a friend who got sent to the federal joint and his whole... it wasn't about him being in jail. He cried about the 85%.
A sick person is a prisoner.
The mellow sweetness of pumpkin pie off a prison spoon is something you will never forget.
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.
Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.
Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
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.
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.
Organized crime in America takes in over forty billion dollars a year. This is quite a profitable sum, especially when one considers that the Mafia spends very little for office supplies.
When it comes to freedom, we are but prisoners of our own desires.
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!
One crime has to be concealed by another.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.
Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached.
