How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.
It is hard, but it is excellent, to find the right knowledge of when correction is necessary and when grace doth most avail.
America is the land of the second chance – and when the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life.
Pardon is the virtue of victory.
It is not at the table, but in prison, that you learn who your true friends are.
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.
Forgiveness, that noblest of all self-denial, is a virtue which he alone who can practise in himself can willingly believe in another.
Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them.
To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.
Prison, dungeons, blessed places where evil is impossible because they are the crossroads of all the evil in the world. One cannot commit evil in hell.
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.
The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.
Since 1957, black people have experienced double-digit unemployment - in good times and bad times. Look at the population of African Americans in prison. They represent more than half the population of prisoners in the country, 55 percent of those on death row.
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.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.
It is safer that a bad man should not be accused, than that he should be acquitted.
No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, that can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.
Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a God.
There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.
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.
Crimes generally punish themselves.
I can work for the Lord in or out of prison.
Trial by jury itself, instead of being a security to persons who are accused, shall be a delusion, a mockery, and a snare.
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.
