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.
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.
A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.
When you are younger you get blamed for crimes you never committed and when you're older you begin to get credit for virtues you never possessed. It evens itself out.
Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
No man survives when freedom fails. The best men rot in filthy jails, and those who cry 'appease, appease' are hanged by those they tried to please.
I can tell you this on a stack of Bibles: prisons are archaic, brutal, unregenerative, overcrowded hell holes where the inmates are treated like animals with absolutely not one humane thought given to what they are going to do once they are released. You're an animal in a cage and you're treated like one.
Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.
The perfection of a thing consists in its essence; there are perfect criminals, as there are men of perfect probity.
Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.
There is no peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war - at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.
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.
Crime is a logical extension of the sort of behavior that often [is] considered perfectly respectable in legitimate business.
Reality becomes a prison to those who can’t get out of it.
The severest justice may not always be the best policy.
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.
Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.
As we grow in wisdom, we pardon more freely.
Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future lives and crimes to society.
Body is a home, a prison and a grave.
Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.
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.
There is a point at which even justice does injury.
The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.
