While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.
I just remember that disturbing feeling of walking into that prison, the complete loss of privacy, the complete loss of stimulation, dignity.
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.
Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.
What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor.
I am an expert of electricity. My father occupied the chair of applied electricity at the state prison.
It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.
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.
And while God had work for Paul, he found him friends both in court and prison. Let persecutors send saints to prison, God can provide a keeper for their turn.
Extreme justice is extreme injustice.
Justice renders to every one his due.
Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.
In my country we go to prison first and then become President.
To be at peace in crime! Ah, who can thus flatter himself.
The only effect of public punishment is to show the rabble how bravely it can be borne; and that every one who hath lost a toe-nail hath suffered worse.
It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.
History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.
Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
Some laws of state aimed at curbing crime are even more criminal.
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.
There is a point at which even justice does injury.
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.
Nor stony tower, nor walls of beaten brass, Nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron, Can be retentive to the strength of spirit; But life, being weary of these worldly bars, Never lacks power to dismiss itself.
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.
