Law is merely the expression of the will of the strongest for the time being, and therefore laws have no fixity, but shift from generation to generation.
There are dreadful punishments enacted against thieves; but it were much better to make such good provisions, by which every man might be put in a method how to live, and so to be preserved from the fatal necessity of stealing and dying for it.
Society has used the juvenile courts to create a caste system where there are throw-away people.
~James Bell
Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a God.
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.
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.
No crime has been without a precedent.
No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
The mellow sweetness of pumpkin pie off a prison spoon is something you will never forget.
The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.
Most people fancy themselves innocent of those crimes of which they cannot be convicted.
In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
I never told a victim story about my imprisonment. Instead, I told a transformation story - about how prison changed my outlook, about how I saw that communication, truth, and trust are at the heart of power.
Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached.
I have never been contained except I made the prison.
You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.
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.
It is not at the table, but in prison, that you learn who your true friends are.
It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.
The difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion is the thickness of a prison walls.
Extreme justice is extreme injustice.
They're not supposed to show prison films in prison. Especially ones that are about escaping.
Steal goods and you’ll go to prison, steal lands and you are a king.
