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.
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 virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.
Money will determine whether the accused goes to prison or walks out of the courtroom a free man.
Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
They were being driven to a prison, through no fault of their own, in all probability for life. In comparison, how much easier it would be to walk to the gallows than to this tomb of living horrors!
I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.
Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilization.
Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.
One man meets an infamous punishment for that crime which confers a diadem upon another.
The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.
The public have more interest in the punishment of an injury than he who receives it.
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.
The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.
To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.
A sick person is a prisoner.
No man should be judge in his own case.
No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
To be at peace in crime! Ah, who can thus flatter himself.
No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, that can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.
Taught from infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.
If you share the crime of your friend, you make it your own.
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.
Whatever you think of de Sade, he was a complex figure and we should not look for easy answers with him. He was, strangely perhaps, against the death penalty, and he was never put in prison for murders or anything like that.
