In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
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.
To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.
Care should be taken that the punishment does not exceed the guilt; and also that some men do not suffer for offenses for which others are not even indicted.
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.
And while God had work for Paul, he found him friends both in court and prison. Let persecutors send saints to prison, God can provide a keeper for their turn.
Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.
Money will determine whether the accused goes to prison or walks out of the courtroom a free man.
I sometimes wish that people would put a little more emphasis upon the observance of the law than they do upon its enforcement.
I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.
No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.
Show me the prison, Show me the jail, Show me the prisoner whose life has gone stale. And I'll show you a young man with so many reasons why And there, but for fortune, go you or I.
I know not whether laws be right, or whether laws be wrong; All that we know who lie in gaol is that the wall is strong; And that each day is like a year, a year whose days are long.
Adversities such as being homeless and going to prison has made many people stronger.
Virtue pardons the wicked, as the sandal-tree perfumes the axe which strikes it.
On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break.
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.
Trial by jury itself, instead of being a security to persons who are accused, shall be a delusion, a mockery, and a snare.
Prison, dungeons, blessed places where evil is impossible because they are the crossroads of all the evil in the world. One cannot commit evil in hell.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
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.
Whatever you think of de Sade, he was a complex figure and we should not look for easy answers with him. He was, strangely perhaps, against the death penalty, and he was never put in prison for murders or anything like that.
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.
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.
