Body is a home, a prison and a grave.
In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.
It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.
You utter a vow, or forge a signature, and you may find yourself bound for life to a monastery, a woman, or prison.
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.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.
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.
The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.
We are prisoners of ideas.
To be at peace in crime! Ah, who can thus flatter himself.
The number of laws is constantly growing in all countries and, owing to this, what is called crime is very often not a crime at all, for it contains no element of violence or harm.
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.
Prison, dungeons, blessed places where evil is impossible because they are the crossroads of all the evil in the world. One cannot commit evil in hell.
How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.
Virtue pardons the wicked, as the sandal-tree perfumes the axe which strikes it.
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.
Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.
He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.
It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.
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.
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.
