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.
It is hard, but it is excellent, to find the right knowledge of when correction is necessary and when grace doth most avail.
Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.
If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.
We have our own system, ... and journalists in our system are not put in prison for embarrassing the government by revealing things the government might not wish to have revealed. The important thing is that our system, under which journalists can write without fear or favor, should continue.
Society has used the juvenile courts to create a caste system where there are throw-away people.
~James Bell
Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.
In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
You utter a vow, or forge a signature, and you may find yourself bound for life to a monastery, a woman, or prison.
Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.
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?
I have been studying how I may compare This prison where I live unto the world; And, for because the world is populous, And here is not a creature but myself, I cannot do it. Yet I'll hammer it out.
If two people fight on the street, whose fault is it? Who is the criminal? It is the government’s responsibility because the government has not educated the people to not make mistakes. The people have inadequate, incompetent education, so they make mistakes! It is such a fraud.
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.
Most people fancy themselves innocent of those crimes of which they cannot be convicted.
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.
I am an expert of electricity. My father occupied the chair of applied electricity at the state prison.
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.
Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a God.
Here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to be to restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work.
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.
Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.
Pardon is the virtue of victory.
Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.
