Justice renders to every one his due.
The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.
If you want total security, go to prison. There you’re fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking…is freedom.
I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.
Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.
It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.
There are few better measures of the concern a society has for its individual members and its own well being than the way it handles criminals.
So justice while she winks at crimes, Stumbles on innocence sometimes.
If you share the crime of your friend, you make it your own.
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.
Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.
We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business.
Law is merely the expression of the will of the strongest for the time being, and therefore laws have no fixity, but shift from generation to generation.
If it's near dinner-time, the foreman takes out his watch when the jury has retired, and says: "Dear me, gentlemen, ten minutes to five, I declare! I dine at five, gentlemen." "So do I," says everybody else, except two men who ought to have dined at three and seem more than half disposed to stand out in consequence. The foreman smiles, and puts up his watch:--"Well, gentlemen, what do we say, plaintiff or defendant, gentlemen?
Body is a home, a prison and a grave.
The uneven impact of actual enforcement measures tends to mirror and reinforce more general patterns of discrimination (along socioeconomic, racial and ethnic, sexual, and perhaps generational lines) within the society. As a consequence, such enforcement (ineffective as it may be in producing conformity) almost certainly reinforces feelings of alienation already prevalent within major segments of the population.
The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
I have been studying how I may compare This prison where I live unto the world; And, for because the world is populous, And here is not a creature but myself, I cannot do it. Yet I'll hammer it out.
Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a God.
The contagion of crime is like that of the plague. Criminals collected together corrupt each other; they are worse than ever when at the termination of their punishment they re-enter society.
Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.
Extreme justice is extreme injustice.
It is certain that the study of human psychology, if it were undertaken exclusively in prisons, would also lead to misrepresentation and absurd generalizations.
To be at peace in crime! Ah, who can thus flatter himself.
Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached.
