The number of laws is constantly growing in all countries and, owing to this, what is called crime is very often not a crime at all, for it contains no element of violence or harm.
If you strike at, imprison, or kill us, out of our prisons or graves we will still evoke a spirit that will thwart you, and perhaps, raise a force that will destroy you! We defy you! Do your worst!
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.
Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts.
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.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
There are dreadful punishments enacted against thieves; but it were much better to make such good provisions, by which every man might be put in a method how to live, and so to be preserved from the fatal necessity of stealing and dying for it.
Man is condemned to be free.
To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.
Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our duty is to furnish it well.
Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.
Let us remember that justice must be observed even to the lowest.
The mellow sweetness of pumpkin pie off a prison spoon is something you will never forget.
Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.
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.
Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
And while God had work for Paul, he found him friends both in court and prison. Let persecutors send saints to prison, God can provide a keeper for their turn.
Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.
Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.
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?
In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.
It is true you cannot eat freedom and you cannot power machinery with democracy. But then neither can political prisoners turn on the light in the cells of a dictatorship.
