Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.
Steal goods and you’ll go to prison, steal lands and you are a king.
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.
Whatever is worthy to be loved for anything is worthy of preservation. A wise and dispassionate legislator, if any such should ever arise among men, will not condemn to death him who has done or is likely to do more service than injury to society. Blocks and gibbets are the nearest objects with legislators, and their business is never with hopes or with virtues.
The torment of human frustration, whatever its immediate cause, is the knowledge that the self is in prison, its vital force and 'mangled mind' leaking away in lonely, wasteful self-conflict.
It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.
Shyness is the prison of the heart.
It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their own kind.
Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.
The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.
It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.
I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.
Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
We're in a war. People who blast some pot on a casual basis are guilty of treason.
If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.
I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.
When is conduct a crime, and when is a crime not a crime? When Somebody Up There -- a monarch, a dictator, a Pope, a legislator -- so decrees.
Extreme justice is extreme injustice.
Some laws of state aimed at curbing crime are even more criminal.
Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.
To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.
The perfection of a thing consists in its essence; there are perfect criminals, as there are men of perfect probity.
Justice renders to every one his due.
So justice while she winks at crimes, Stumbles on innocence sometimes.
