It is safer that a bad man should not be accused, than that he should be acquitted.
Whatever you think of de Sade, he was a complex figure and we should not look for easy answers with him. He was, strangely perhaps, against the death penalty, and he was never put in prison for murders or anything like that.
If we look at Houston, which is a very environmentally toxic place, we find that it has one of the highest levels of young men going to prison and also among the highest levels of illiteracy in the country.
While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.
It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.
It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.
If you strike at, imprison, or kill us, out of our prisons or graves we will still evoke a spirit that will thwart you, and perhaps, raise a force that will destroy you! We defy you! Do your worst!
It is hard, but it is excellent, to find the right knowledge of when correction is necessary and when grace doth most avail.
To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.
In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
Taught from infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.
On average, drug prisoners spend more time in federal prison than rapists, who often get out on early release because of the overcrowding in prison caused by the Drug War.
The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.
So justice while she winks at crimes, Stumbles on innocence sometimes.
Written laws are like spiders' webs, and will, like them, only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful will easily break through them.
The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.
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.
Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our duty is to furnish it well.
A variety in punishment is of utility, as well as a proportion.
Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.
When it comes to freedom, we are but prisoners of our own desires.
There is no peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war - at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.
In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.
I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky.
Every crime has, in the moment of its perpetration, Its own avenging angel--dark misgiving, An ominous sinking at the inmost heart.
