Steal goods and you’ll go to prison, steal lands and you are a king.
Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.
It is not at the table, but in prison, that you learn who your true friends are.
The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.
Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.
It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.
It is safer that a bad man should not be accused, than that he should be acquitted.
To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.
It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.
Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.
I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.
Shyness is the prison of the heart.
Well does Heaven have care that no man secures happiness by crime.
The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.
The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.
Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.
They're not supposed to show prison films in prison. Especially ones that are about escaping.
Crime succeeds by sudden despatch; honest counsels gain vigor by delay.
It is impossible to go through life without trust: That is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.
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?
Crimes generally punish themselves.
Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
No crime has been without a precedent.
