No crime has been without a precedent.
One crime has to be concealed by another.
Law is merely the expression of the will of the strongest for the time being, and therefore laws have no fixity, but shift from generation to generation.
The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.
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.
It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.
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?
The severest justice may not always be the best policy.
By noiselessly going to a prison a civil-resister ensures a calm atmosphere.
The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.
Crimes generally punish themselves.
I never told a victim story about my imprisonment. Instead, I told a transformation story - about how prison changed my outlook, about how I saw that communication, truth, and trust are at the heart of power.
Money will determine whether the accused goes to prison or walks out of the courtroom a free man.
In my country we go to prison first and then become President.
Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
We who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments.
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.
It is hard, but it is excellent, to find the right knowledge of when correction is necessary and when grace doth most avail.
There are dreadful punishments enacted against thieves; but it were much better to make such good provisions, by which every man might be put in a method how to live, and so to be preserved from the fatal necessity of stealing and dying for it.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.
Crime succeeds by sudden despatch; honest counsels gain vigor by delay.
There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.
Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.
