The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.
It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.
Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
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.
Adversities such as being homeless and going to prison has made many people stronger.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.
The uneven impact of actual enforcement measures tends to mirror and reinforce more general patterns of discrimination (along socioeconomic, racial and ethnic, sexual, and perhaps generational lines) within the society. As a consequence, such enforcement (ineffective as it may be in producing conformity) almost certainly reinforces feelings of alienation already prevalent within major segments of the population.
I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.
Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.
One man meets an infamous punishment for that crime which confers a diadem upon another.
Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.
The torment of human frustration, whatever its immediate cause, is the knowledge that the self is in prison, its vital force and 'mangled mind' leaking away in lonely, wasteful self-conflict.
You utter a vow, or forge a signature, and you may find yourself bound for life to a monastery, a woman, or prison.
It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.
If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.
Fear can be like a prison. It is, however, a self made prison. Many are imprisoned by fear. No one else can liberate them from this prison. Others may inspire them but they must liberate themselves.
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?
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.
There are few better measures of the concern a society has for its individual members and its own well being than the way it handles criminals.
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.
Pardon is the virtue of victory.
The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.
They're not supposed to show prison films in prison. Especially ones that are about escaping.
