It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.
One crime is everything; two nothing.
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?
Well does Heaven have care that no man secures happiness by crime.
I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.
While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.
Shyness is the prison of the heart.
Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them.
Here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to be to restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work.
Reality becomes a prison to those who can’t get out of it.
The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.
Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts.
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.
He was a first-time nonviolent possible offender, ... And under the mandatory minimums, he was put in prison for 15 years. Not only does the punishment not fit the crime, but the mandatory minimums don't give judges any discretion to look at the background of the case, to read into the specifics of the case. I don't know a judge who really is in favor of the mandatory minimums.
Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.
Let us remember that justice must be observed even to the lowest.
It is certain that the study of human psychology, if it were undertaken exclusively in prisons, would also lead to misrepresentation and absurd generalizations.
I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up...I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through, before they could get to be as free as I was.
Crime is a logical extension of the sort of behavior that often [is] considered perfectly respectable in legitimate business.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.
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.
It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
It is not at the table, but in prison, that you learn who your true friends are.
