Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
The number of laws is constantly growing in all countries and, owing to this, what is called crime is very often not a crime at all, for it contains no element of violence or harm.
We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.
It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.
Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.
Trial by jury itself, instead of being a security to persons who are accused, shall be a delusion, a mockery, and a snare.
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.
Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.
Whatever is worthy to be loved for anything is worthy of preservation. A wise and dispassionate legislator, if any such should ever arise among men, will not condemn to death him who has done or is likely to do more service than injury to society. Blocks and gibbets are the nearest objects with legislators, and their business is never with hopes or with virtues.
In my country we go to prison first and then become President.
Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.
Every instance of a man's suffering the penalty of the law is an instance of the failure of that penalty in effecting its purpose, which is to deter.
Virtue pardons the wicked, as the sandal-tree perfumes the axe which strikes it.
The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.
Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.
I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky.
There's no greater threat to our independence, to our cherished freedoms and personal liberties than the continual, relentless injection of these insidious poisons into our system. We must decide whether we cherish independence from drugs, without which there is no freedom.
The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.
What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.
Crime succeeds by sudden despatch; honest counsels gain vigor by delay.
To be at peace in crime! Ah, who can thus flatter himself.
