We are prisoners of ideas.
Steal goods and you’ll go to prison, steal lands and you are a king.
The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.
We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business.
The mellow sweetness of pumpkin pie off a prison spoon is something you will never forget.
Experts and the educated elite have replaced what worked with what sounded good. Society was far more civilized before they took over our schools, prisons, welfare programs, police departments and courts. It's high time we ran these people out of our lives and went back to common sense.
He had drawn many a thousand of these rations in prisons and camps, and though he'd never had an opportunity to weight them on scales, and although, being a man of timid nature, he knew no way of standing up for his rights, he, like every other prisoner, had discovered long ago that honest weight was never to be found in the bread-cutting. There was short weight in every ration. The only point was how short. So every day you took a look to soothe your soul - today, maybe, they haven't snitched any.
One man meets an infamous punishment for that crime which confers a diadem upon another.
A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.
Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.
Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.
The only effect of public punishment is to show the rabble how bravely it can be borne; and that every one who hath lost a toe-nail hath suffered worse.
How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.
Shyness is the prison of the heart.
In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
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.
I am an expert of electricity. My father occupied the chair of applied electricity at the state prison.
If you want total security, go to prison. There you’re fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking…is freedom.
Show me the prison, Show me the jail, Show me the prisoner whose life has gone stale. And I'll show you a young man with so many reasons why And there, but for fortune, go you or I.
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.
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.
In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.
Well does Heaven have care that no man secures happiness by crime.
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.
