Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.
The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.
To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.
It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.
The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.
In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.
I existed in a world that never is - the prison of the mind.
The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.
Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.
The difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion is the thickness of a prison walls.
Organized crime in America takes in over forty billion dollars a year. This is quite a profitable sum, especially when one considers that the Mafia spends very little for office supplies.
Federal prison, if you get any of it, you're going to have to do 85% of it. And the reason why I called it that is because I had a friend who got sent to the federal joint and his whole... it wasn't about him being in jail. He cried about the 85%.
What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor.
I have never been contained except I made the prison.
I am an expert of electricity. My father occupied the chair of applied electricity at the state prison.
No man should be judge in his own case.
Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.
The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They keep returning to the same things.
He had drawn many a thousand of these rations in prisons and camps, and though he'd never had an opportunity to weight them on scales, and although, being a man of timid nature, he knew no way of standing up for his rights, he, like every other prisoner, had discovered long ago that honest weight was never to be found in the bread-cutting. There was short weight in every ration. The only point was how short. So every day you took a look to soothe your soul - today, maybe, they haven't snitched any.
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.
Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.
We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business.
It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.
When the Nazis came for the communists, I remained silent; I was not a communist. When they locked up the social democrats, I remained silent; I was not a social democrat. When they came for the trade unionists, I did not speak out; I was not a trade unionist. When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out.
I know not whether laws be right, or whether laws be wrong; All that we know who lie in gaol is that the wall is strong; And that each day is like a year, a year whose days are long.
