One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.
I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice.
I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.
A man who has no excuse for a crime, is indeed defenseless!
Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
No man should be judge in his own case.
One crime is everything; two nothing.
While crime is punished it yet increases.
To seek the redress of grievances by going to law, is like sheep running for shelter to a bramble bush.
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.
Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.
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.
The perfection of a thing consists in its essence; there are perfect criminals, as there are men of perfect probity.
The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.
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.
The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.
The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.
Every instance of a man's suffering the penalty of the law is an instance of the failure of that penalty in effecting its purpose, which is to deter.
If you share the crime of your friend, you make it your own.
So justice while she winks at crimes, Stumbles on innocence sometimes.
On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break.
To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.
The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.
We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business.
Concepts of justice must have hands and feet to carry out justice in every case in the shortest possible time and the lowest possible cost. That is the challenge to every lawyer and judge in America.
