It is not at the table, but in prison, that you learn who your true friends are.
No man should be judge in his own case.
In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.
Every crime has, in the moment of its perpetration, Its own avenging angel--dark misgiving, An ominous sinking at the inmost heart.
A man who has no excuse for a crime, is indeed defenseless!
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.
Women now have choices. They can be married, not married, have a job, not have a job, be married with children, unmarried with children. Men have the same choice we've always had: work, or prison.
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 sometimes wish that people would put a little more emphasis upon the observance of the law than they do upon its enforcement.
Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.
Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.
Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.
He had drawn many a thousand of these rations in prisons and camps, and though he'd never had an opportunity to weight them on scales, and although, being a man of timid nature, he knew no way of standing up for his rights, he, like every other prisoner, had discovered long ago that honest weight was never to be found in the bread-cutting. There was short weight in every ration. The only point was how short. So every day you took a look to soothe your soul - today, maybe, they haven't snitched any.
Forgiveness, that noblest of all self-denial, is a virtue which he alone who can practise in himself can willingly believe in another.
They're not supposed to show prison films in prison. Especially ones that are about escaping.
There is no greater punishment of wickedness that that it is dissatisfied with itself and its deeds.
It is safer that a bad man should not be accused, than that he should be acquitted.
Virtue pardons the wicked, as the sandal-tree perfumes the axe which strikes it.
I have been studying how I may compare this prison where I live unto the world; Shut up in the prison of their own consciences.
The mellow sweetness of pumpkin pie off a prison spoon is something you will never forget.
Concepts of justice must have hands and feet to carry out justice in every case in the shortest possible time and the lowest possible cost. That is the challenge to every lawyer and judge in America.
I am an expert of electricity. My father occupied the chair of applied electricity at the state prison.
A country is in a bad state, which is governed only by laws; because a thousand things occur for which laws cannot provide, and where authority ought to interpose.
Society has used the juvenile courts to create a caste system where there are throw-away people.
~James Bell
Three hundred years ago a prisoner condemned to the Tower of London carved on the wall of his cell this sentiment to keep up his spirits during his long imprisonment: “It is not adversity that kills, but the impatience with which we bear adversity.”
