Forgiveness, that noblest of all self-denial, is a virtue which he alone who can practise in himself can willingly believe in another.
To be at peace in crime! Ah, who can thus flatter himself.
It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.
The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.
Any punishment that does not correct, that can merely rouse rebellion in whoever has to endure it, is a piece of gratuitous infamy which makes those who impose it more guilty in the eyes of humanity, good sense and reason, nay a hundred times more guilty than the victim on whom the punishment is inflicted.
We who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments.
Women now have choices. They can be married, not married, have a job, not have a job, be married with children, unmarried with children. Men have the same choice we've always had: work, or prison.
One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.
In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
It is true you cannot eat freedom and you cannot power machinery with democracy. But then neither can political prisoners turn on the light in the cells of a dictatorship.
Do not lay on the multitude the blame that is due to a few.
I existed in a world that never is - the prison of the mind.
No crime has been without a precedent.
Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.
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.
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.
There is no greater punishment of wickedness that that it is dissatisfied with itself and its deeds.
In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.
One crime has to be concealed by another.
The only difference between me and my fellow actors is that I've spent more time in jail.
A man who has no excuse for a crime, is indeed defenseless!
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.
It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.
