The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.
Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.
It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.
Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, that can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.
Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.
One crime is everything; two nothing.
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.
When it comes to freedom, we are but prisoners of our own desires.
Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.
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.
Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.
History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.
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.
I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.
Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.
Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.
It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.
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.
Well does Heaven have care that no man secures happiness by crime.
Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.
I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.
Wicked deeds are generally done, even with impunity, for the mere desire of occupation.
A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.
He was a first-time nonviolent possible offender, ... And under the mandatory minimums, he was put in prison for 15 years. Not only does the punishment not fit the crime, but the mandatory minimums don't give judges any discretion to look at the background of the case, to read into the specifics of the case. I don't know a judge who really is in favor of the mandatory minimums.
