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.
Well does Heaven have care that no man secures happiness by crime.
Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a God.
Shyness is the prison of the heart.
Trial by jury itself, instead of being a security to persons who are accused, shall be a delusion, a mockery, and a snare.
Virtue pardons the wicked, as the sandal-tree perfumes the axe which strikes it.
Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.
It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.
One of the problems that the marijuana reform movement consistently faces is that everyone wants to talk about what marijuana does, but no one ever wants to look at what marijuana prohibition does. Marijuana never kicks down your door in the middle of the night. Marijuana never locks up sick and dying people, does not suppress medical research, does not peek in bedroom windows.
There is no peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war - at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.
It is certain that the study of human psychology, if it were undertaken exclusively in prisons, would also lead to misrepresentation and absurd generalizations.
The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.
The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.
One crime is everything; two nothing.
The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.
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.
Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.
It is not at the table, but in prison, that you learn who your true friends are.
Most people fancy themselves innocent of those crimes of which they cannot be convicted.
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?
The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.
When it comes to freedom, we are but prisoners of our own desires.
Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.
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.
Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them.
