Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
One crime is everything; two nothing.
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.
Forgiveness, that noblest of all self-denial, is a virtue which he alone who can practise in himself can willingly believe in another.
A country is in a bad state, which is governed only by laws; because a thousand things occur for which laws cannot provide, and where authority ought to interpose.
Crime is a logical extension of the sort of behavior that often [is] considered perfectly respectable in legitimate business.
To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.
I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.
A sick person is a prisoner.
Money will determine whether the accused goes to prison or walks out of the courtroom a free man.
Federal prison, if you get any of it, you're going to have to do 85% of it. And the reason why I called it that is because I had a friend who got sent to the federal joint and his whole... it wasn't about him being in jail. He cried about the 85%.
The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.
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.
America is the land of the second chance – and when the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life.
The world itself is but a large prison, out of which some are daily led to execution.
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.
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.
Let us remember that justice must be observed even to the lowest.
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.
Trial by jury itself, instead of being a security to persons who are accused, shall be a delusion, a mockery, and a snare.
The public have more interest in the punishment of an injury than he who receives it.
Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
If you treat prisoners well, they will be less angry, less inclined to violence inside prison, less likely to provoke violent actions by guards, less likely to have reason to file brutality lawsuits that cost taxpayers a bundle and waste administrators' time. And most important, well-treated prisoners will be less likely to leave prison angrier, more vicious and more inclined to criminal behavior than when they went in.
A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.
