Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.
They took away my money, my family, and my security. Why couldn't they destroy my ideas? We will question them in court tomorrow as we trigger The Revolution of all revolutions!
As we grow in wisdom, we pardon more freely.
Since 1957, black people have experienced double-digit unemployment - in good times and bad times. Look at the population of African Americans in prison. They represent more than half the population of prisoners in the country, 55 percent of those on death row.
I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.
Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.
To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.
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?
It is hard, but it is excellent, to find the right knowledge of when correction is necessary and when grace doth most avail.
Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.
We shall fight against them, throw them in prisons and destroy them.
The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.
I was in prison, and you came unto me. Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.
~(Jesus Christ) Matthew 25:36, 40
I can work for the Lord in or out of prison.
It is safer that a bad man should not be accused, than that he should be acquitted.
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 guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.
The only effect of public punishment is to show the rabble how bravely it can be borne; and that every one who hath lost a toe-nail hath suffered worse.
He who profits by a crime commits it.
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.
To trial bring her stolen charms, and let her prison be my arms.
Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts.
Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.
