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.
Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.
Any punishment that does not correct, that can merely rouse rebellion in whoever has to endure it, is a piece of gratuitous infamy which makes those who impose it more guilty in the eyes of humanity, good sense and reason, nay a hundred times more guilty than the victim on whom the punishment is inflicted.
We are prisoners of ideas.
It is not at the table, but in prison, that you learn who your true friends are.
He had drawn many a thousand of these rations in prisons and camps, and though he'd never had an opportunity to weight them on scales, and although, being a man of timid nature, he knew no way of standing up for his rights, he, like every other prisoner, had discovered long ago that honest weight was never to be found in the bread-cutting. There was short weight in every ration. The only point was how short. So every day you took a look to soothe your soul - today, maybe, they haven't snitched any.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.
The world itself is but a large prison, out of which some are daily led to execution.
No man survives when freedom fails. The best men rot in filthy jails, and those who cry 'appease, appease' are hanged by those they tried to please.
We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business.
When is conduct a crime, and when is a crime not a crime? When Somebody Up There -- a monarch, a dictator, a Pope, a legislator -- so decrees.
Prison makes you a better judge of character. You pick up on people much faster.
We who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments.
As we grow in wisdom, we pardon more freely.
Organized crime in America takes in over forty billion dollars a year. This is quite a profitable sum, especially when one considers that the Mafia spends very little for office supplies.
The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.
One crime is everything; two nothing.
Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.
Trial by jury itself, instead of being a security to persons who are accused, shall be a delusion, a mockery, and a snare.
I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky.
Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.
I sometimes wish that people would put a little more emphasis upon the observance of the law than they do upon its enforcement.
It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.
In prison, you get the chance to see who really loves you.
In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.
