Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.
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.
The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.
The severest justice may not always be the best policy.
No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.
The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.
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.
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.
Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.
Trial by jury itself, instead of being a security to persons who are accused, shall be a delusion, a mockery, and a snare.
The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.
While crime is punished it yet increases.
Shyness is the prison of the heart.
It is safer that a bad man should not be accused, than that he should be acquitted.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
Concepts of justice must have hands and feet to carry out justice in every case in the shortest possible time and the lowest possible cost. That is the challenge to every lawyer and judge in America.
It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.
No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.
Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.
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.
A man who has no excuse for a crime, is indeed defenseless!
Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X came out of prison stronger.
The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They keep returning to the same things.
