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.
The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business.
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.
I can work for the Lord in or out of prison.
When is conduct a crime, and when is a crime not a crime? When Somebody Up There -- a monarch, a dictator, a Pope, a legislator -- so decrees.
Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.
Reality becomes a prison to those who can’t get out of it.
While crime is punished it yet increases.
Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?
To trial bring her stolen charms, and let her prison be my arms.
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.
Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.
Three hundred years ago a prisoner condemned to the Tower of London carved on the wall of his cell this sentiment to keep up his spirits during his long imprisonment: “It is not adversity that kills, but the impatience with which we bear adversity.”
Money will determine whether the accused goes to prison or walks out of the courtroom a free man.
The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.
Steal goods and you’ll go to prison, steal lands and you are a king.
We are prisoners of ideas.
It is hard, but it is excellent, to find the right knowledge of when correction is necessary and when grace doth most avail.
It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.
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.
In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
Self is the only prison that can bind the soul.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.
