Women now have choices. They can be married, not married, have a job, not have a job, be married with children, unmarried with children. Men have the same choice we've always had: work, or prison.
It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.
Forgiveness, that noblest of all self-denial, is a virtue which he alone who can practise in himself can willingly believe in another.
One man meets an infamous punishment for that crime which confers a diadem upon another.
To seek the redress of grievances by going to law, is like sheep running for shelter to a bramble bush.
One crime is everything; two nothing.
The best situation of all, and one frequently utilized, is for jails and prisons to allow volunteer ministers of all faiths to enter prisons and offer their services to the inmates who want them. That way, the religious needs of inmates are met but without government funds being spent.
Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.
The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.
The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.
I was in prison, and you came unto me. Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.
~(Jesus Christ) Matthew 25:36, 40
Fear can be like a prison. It is, however, a self made prison. Many are imprisoned by fear. No one else can liberate them from this prison. Others may inspire them but they must liberate themselves.
If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.
The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.
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.
Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
Let us remember that justice must be observed even to the lowest.
To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.
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?
On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break.
Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?
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.
Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.
