Quotes

No crime has been without a precedent.

They're not supposed to show prison films in prison. Especially ones that are about escaping.

Pardon is the virtue of victory.

Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilization.

Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.

Money will determine whether the accused goes to prison or walks out of the courtroom a free man.

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.

You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.

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.

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

Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.

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

Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.

It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.

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.

A variety in punishment is of utility, as well as a proportion.

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

When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.

If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.

Faults of the head are punished in this world, those of the heart in another; but as most of our vices are compound, so also is their punishment.

The mellow sweetness of pumpkin pie off a prison spoon is something you will never forget.

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

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.

Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.

A man who has no excuse for a crime, is indeed defenseless!