Prison Quotes

The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.

The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.

The public have more interest in the punishment of an injury than he who receives it.

Written laws are like spiders' webs, and will, like them, only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful will easily break through them.

It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.

No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.

Extreme justice is extreme injustice.

I was put into jail as I was going to the shoemaker's to get a shoe which was mended. When I was let out the next morning, I proceeded to finish my errand, and, having put on my mended shoe, joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct; and in half an hour -- for the horse was soon tackled -- was in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off, and then the State was nowhere to be seen.

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.

He was a first-time nonviolent possible offender, ... And under the mandatory minimums, he was put in prison for 15 years. Not only does the punishment not fit the crime, but the mandatory minimums don't give judges any discretion to look at the background of the case, to read into the specifics of the case. I don't know a judge who really is in favor of the mandatory minimums.

I have been studying how I may compare this prison where I live unto the world; Shut up in the prison of their own consciences.

Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.