There is a point at which even justice does injury.
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.
No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.
Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.
I have been studying how I may compare this prison where I live unto the world; Shut up in the prison of their own consciences.
A man who has no excuse for a crime, is indeed defenseless!
I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.
One crime has to be concealed by another.
So justice while she winks at crimes, Stumbles on innocence sometimes.
What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.
I can tell you this on a stack of Bibles: prisons are archaic, brutal, unregenerative, overcrowded hell holes where the inmates are treated like animals with absolutely not one humane thought given to what they are going to do once they are released. You're an animal in a cage and you're treated like one.
Concepts of justice must have hands and feet to carry out justice in every case in the shortest possible time and the lowest possible cost. That is the challenge to every lawyer and judge in America.
Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a God.
Wherever any one is against his will, that is to him a prison.
And while God had work for Paul, he found him friends both in court and prison. Let persecutors send saints to prison, God can provide a keeper for their turn.
I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.
As we grow in wisdom, we pardon more freely.
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.”
It is certain that the study of human psychology, if it were undertaken exclusively in prisons, would also lead to misrepresentation and absurd generalizations.
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.
The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.
They're not supposed to show prison films in prison. Especially ones that are about escaping.
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.
