Quotes

Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.

One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.

We who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments.

Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.

The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.

We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.

Women now have choices. They can be married, not married, have a job, not have a job, be married with children, unmarried with children. Men have the same choice we've always had: work, or prison.

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.

Body is a home, a prison and a grave.

It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.

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 two people fight on the street, whose fault is it? Who is the criminal? It is the government’s responsibility because the government has not educated the people to not make mistakes. The people have inadequate, incompetent education, so they make mistakes! It is such a fraud.

I never told a victim story about my imprisonment. Instead, I told a transformation story - about how prison changed my outlook, about how I saw that communication, truth, and trust are at the heart of power.

Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.

No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.

The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.

The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.

It is safer that a bad man should not be accused, than that he should be acquitted.

One man meets an infamous punishment for that crime which confers a diadem upon another.

Trial by jury itself, instead of being a security to persons who are accused, shall be a delusion, a mockery, and a snare.

In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.

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.

It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their own kind.

Prosecution I have managed to avoid; but I have been arrested, charged in a police court, have refused to be bound over, and thereupon have been unconditionally released - to my great regret; for I have always wanted to know what going to prison was like.

There are dreadful punishments enacted against thieves; but it were much better to make such good provisions, by which every man might be put in a method how to live, and so to be preserved from the fatal necessity of stealing and dying for it.