Taught from infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.
Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.
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?
The mellow sweetness of pumpkin pie off a prison spoon is something you will never forget.
Any punishment that does not correct, that can merely rouse rebellion in whoever has to endure it, is a piece of gratuitous infamy which makes those who impose it more guilty in the eyes of humanity, good sense and reason, nay a hundred times more guilty than the victim on whom the punishment is inflicted.
Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.
It is safer that a bad man should not be accused, than that he should be acquitted.
Written laws are like spiders' webs, and will, like them, only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful will easily break through them.
I know not whether laws be right, or whether laws be wrong; All that we know who lie in gaol is that the wall is strong; And that each day is like a year, a year whose days are long.
Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.
Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.
He who opens a school door, closes a prison.
The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.
Trial by jury itself, instead of being a security to persons who are accused, shall be a delusion, a mockery, and a snare.
Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.
The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.
A variety in punishment is of utility, as well as a proportion.
Some laws of state aimed at curbing crime are even more criminal.
One crime is everything; two nothing.
How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.
I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.
Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a God.
One crime has to be concealed by another.
I was put into jail as I was going to the shoemaker's to get a shoe which was mended. When I was let out the next morning, I proceeded to finish my errand, and, having put on my mended shoe, joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct; and in half an hour -- for the horse was soon tackled -- was in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off, and then the State was nowhere to be seen.
