It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.
If you share the crime of your friend, you make it your own.
The only difference between me and my fellow actors is that I've spent more time in jail.
A sick person is a prisoner.
The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.
Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilization.
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.
Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.
The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.
Faults of the head are punished in this world, those of the heart in another; but as most of our vices are compound, so also is their punishment.
No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, that can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.
Concepts of justice must have hands and feet to carry out justice in every case in the shortest possible time and the lowest possible cost. That is the challenge to every lawyer and judge in America.
It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.
Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.
Society has used the juvenile courts to create a caste system where there are throw-away people.
~James Bell
The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.
There is a point at which even justice does injury.
To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.
Pardon is the virtue of victory.
You utter a vow, or forge a signature, and you may find yourself bound for life to a monastery, a woman, or prison.
I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky.
In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.
