Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.
One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.
I have never been contained except I made the prison.
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 only effect of public punishment is to show the rabble how bravely it can be borne; and that every one who hath lost a toe-nail hath suffered worse.
In my country we go to prison first and then become President.
He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it.
In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.
Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.
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.
One man meets an infamous punishment for that crime which confers a diadem upon another.
It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.
The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.
It is not at the table, but in prison, that you learn who your true friends are.
Women have worked hard; starved in prison; given of their time and lives that we might sit in the House of Commons and take part in the legislating of this country.
Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached.
I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.
They took away my money, my family, and my security. Why couldn't they destroy my ideas? We will question them in court tomorrow as we trigger The Revolution of all revolutions!
I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice.
We shall not yield to violence. We shall not be deprived of union freedoms. We shall never agree with sending people to prison for their convictions.
There is a point at which even justice does injury.
Crime succeeds by sudden despatch; honest counsels gain vigor by delay.
Since 1957, black people have experienced double-digit unemployment - in good times and bad times. Look at the population of African Americans in prison. They represent more than half the population of prisoners in the country, 55 percent of those on death row.
