No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
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.
The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.
I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky.
I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
The uneven impact of actual enforcement measures tends to mirror and reinforce more general patterns of discrimination (along socioeconomic, racial and ethnic, sexual, and perhaps generational lines) within the society. As a consequence, such enforcement (ineffective as it may be in producing conformity) almost certainly reinforces feelings of alienation already prevalent within major segments of the population.
The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.
Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.
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
So justice while she winks at crimes, Stumbles on innocence sometimes.
In prison, you get the chance to see who really loves you.
Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.
There is no greater punishment of wickedness that that it is dissatisfied with itself and its deeds.
I was put into jail as I was going to the shoemaker's to get a shoe which was mended. When I was let out the next morning, I proceeded to finish my errand, and, having put on my mended shoe, joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct; and in half an hour -- for the horse was soon tackled -- was in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off, and then the State was nowhere to be seen.
It is not at the table, but in prison, that you learn who your true friends are.
Crimes generally punish themselves.
Trial by jury itself, instead of being a security to persons who are accused, shall be a delusion, a mockery, and a snare.
Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.
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.
Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.
Here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to be to restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work.
We are prisoners of ideas.
In jail a man has no personality. He is a minor disposal problem and a few entries on reports. Nobody cares who loves or hates him, what he looks like, what he did with his life. Nobody reacts to him unless he gives trouble. Nobody abuses him. All that is asked of him is that he go quietly to the right cell and remain quiet when he gets there. There is nothing to fight against, nothing to be mad at. The jailers are quiet men without animosity or sadism.
