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.
It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.
Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them.
Wherever any one is against his will, that is to him a prison.
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.
It is impossible to go through life without trust: That is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.
While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.
One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.
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.
What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.
To be at peace in crime! Ah, who can thus flatter himself.
Forgiveness, that noblest of all self-denial, is a virtue which he alone who can practise in himself can willingly believe in another.
It is true you cannot eat freedom and you cannot power machinery with democracy. But then neither can political prisoners turn on the light in the cells of a dictatorship.
Some laws of state aimed at curbing crime are even more criminal.
A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.
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 sometimes wish that people would put a little more emphasis upon the observance of the law than they do upon its enforcement.
Crime is a logical extension of the sort of behavior that often [is] considered perfectly respectable in legitimate business.
Prison makes you a better judge of character. You pick up on people much faster.
Justice renders to every one his due.
Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.
Written laws are like spiders' webs, and will, like them, only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful will easily break through them.
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 average, drug prisoners spend more time in federal prison than rapists, who often get out on early release because of the overcrowding in prison caused by the Drug War.
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.
