Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
If you want total security, go to prison. There you’re fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking…is freedom.
Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.
There is a point at which even justice does injury.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.
The perfection of a thing consists in its essence; there are perfect criminals, as there are men of perfect probity.
In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.
I sometimes wish that people would put a little more emphasis upon the observance of the law than they do upon its enforcement.
Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.
When you are younger you get blamed for crimes you never committed and when you're older you begin to get credit for virtues you never possessed. It evens itself out.
Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.
What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.
In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
Prosecution I have managed to avoid; but I have been arrested, charged in a police court, have refused to be bound over, and thereupon have been unconditionally released - to my great regret; for I have always wanted to know what going to prison was like.
To seek the redress of grievances by going to law, is like sheep running for shelter to a bramble bush.
As we grow in wisdom, we pardon more freely.
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.
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.
We shall fight against them, throw them in prisons and destroy them.
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.
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?
I have been studying how I may compare This prison where I live unto the world; And, for because the world is populous, And here is not a creature but myself, I cannot do it. Yet I'll hammer it out.
We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business.
