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.
The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.
We are prisoners of ideas.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
Self is the only prison that can bind the soul.
Body is a home, a prison and a grave.
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.
Fast closed with double grills And triple gates–the cell To wicked souls is hell; But to a mind that's innocent 'Tis only iron, wood and stone.
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.
A variety in punishment is of utility, as well as a proportion.
Experts and the educated elite have replaced what worked with what sounded good. Society was far more civilized before they took over our schools, prisons, welfare programs, police departments and courts. It's high time we ran these people out of our lives and went back to common sense.
The contagion of crime is like that of the plague. Criminals collected together corrupt each other; they are worse than ever when at the termination of their punishment they re-enter society.
It is safer that a bad man should not be accused, than that he should be acquitted.
In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.
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.
Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.
One of the problems that the marijuana reform movement consistently faces is that everyone wants to talk about what marijuana does, but no one ever wants to look at what marijuana prohibition does. Marijuana never kicks down your door in the middle of the night. Marijuana never locks up sick and dying people, does not suppress medical research, does not peek in bedroom windows.
I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.
The best situation of all, and one frequently utilized, is for jails and prisons to allow volunteer ministers of all faiths to enter prisons and offer their services to the inmates who want them. That way, the religious needs of inmates are met but without government funds being spent.
We shall fight against them, throw them in prisons and destroy them.
It is hard, but it is excellent, to find the right knowledge of when correction is necessary and when grace doth most avail.
Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.
The perfection of a thing consists in its essence; there are perfect criminals, as there are men of perfect probity.
Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.
