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?
Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.
Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our duty is to furnish it well.
Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached.
If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.
In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.
Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them.
They're not supposed to show prison films in prison. Especially ones that are about escaping.
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.
Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.
I have never been contained except I made the prison.
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.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.
It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.
I can tell you this on a stack of Bibles: prisons are archaic, brutal, unregenerative, overcrowded hell holes where the inmates are treated like animals with absolutely not one humane thought given to what they are going to do once they are released. You're an animal in a cage and you're treated like one.
You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.
On average, drug prisoners spend more time in federal prison than rapists, who often get out on early release because of the overcrowding in prison caused by the Drug War.
Forgiveness, that noblest of all self-denial, is a virtue which he alone who can practise in himself can willingly believe in another.
A sick person is a prisoner.
The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.
In jail a man has no personality. He is a minor disposal problem and a few entries on reports. Nobody cares who loves or hates him, what he looks like, what he did with his life. Nobody reacts to him unless he gives trouble. Nobody abuses him. All that is asked of him is that he go quietly to the right cell and remain quiet when he gets there. There is nothing to fight against, nothing to be mad at. The jailers are quiet men without animosity or sadism.
The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.
They were being driven to a prison, through no fault of their own, in all probability for life. In comparison, how much easier it would be to walk to the gallows than to this tomb of living horrors!
