To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.
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.
Nor stony tower, nor walls of beaten brass, Nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron, Can be retentive to the strength of spirit; But life, being weary of these worldly bars, Never lacks power to dismiss itself.
I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up...I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through, before they could get to be as free as I was.
To trial bring her stolen charms, and let her prison be my arms.
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.
I was put into jail as I was going to the shoemaker's to get a shoe which was mended. When I was let out the next morning, I proceeded to finish my errand, and, having put on my mended shoe, joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct; and in half an hour -- for the horse was soon tackled -- was in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off, and then the State was nowhere to be seen.
It is safer that a bad man should not be accused, than that he should be acquitted.
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.
Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.
While crime is punished it yet increases.
Most people fancy themselves innocent of those crimes of which they cannot be convicted.
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.
Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.
No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
Care should be taken that the punishment does not exceed the guilt; and also that some men do not suffer for offenses for which others are not even indicted.
I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.
I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.
It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.
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.
In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.
Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.
Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.
Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.
What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor.
