Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrist? And what has he been after that they groan and shake their fists? And wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air? Oh they're taking him to prison for the colour of his hair.
You utter a vow, or forge a signature, and you may find yourself bound for life to a monastery, a woman, or prison.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
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 better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.
I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.
If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.
No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
Whatever is worthy to be loved for anything is worthy of preservation. A wise and dispassionate legislator, if any such should ever arise among men, will not condemn to death him who has done or is likely to do more service than injury to society. Blocks and gibbets are the nearest objects with legislators, and their business is never with hopes or with virtues.
No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.
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.
The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They keep returning to the same things.
The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.
If you strike at, imprison, or kill us, out of our prisons or graves we will still evoke a spirit that will thwart you, and perhaps, raise a force that will destroy you! We defy you! Do your worst!
Pardon is the virtue of victory.
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.
Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?
He who profits by a crime commits it.
We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business.
Wicked deeds are generally done, even with impunity, for the mere desire of occupation.
Shyness is the prison of the heart.
Steal goods and you’ll go to prison, steal lands and you are a king.
It is hard, but it is excellent, to find the right knowledge of when correction is necessary and when grace doth most avail.
