A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.
Trial by jury itself, instead of being a security to persons who are accused, shall be a delusion, a mockery, and a snare.
It is safer that a bad man should not be accused, than that he should be acquitted.
Organized crime in America takes in over forty billion dollars a year. This is quite a profitable sum, especially when one considers that the Mafia spends very little for office supplies.
A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
Crimes generally punish themselves.
It is certain that the study of human psychology, if it were undertaken exclusively in prisons, would also lead to misrepresentation and absurd generalizations.
It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.
If it's near dinner-time, the foreman takes out his watch when the jury has retired, and says: "Dear me, gentlemen, ten minutes to five, I declare! I dine at five, gentlemen." "So do I," says everybody else, except two men who ought to have dined at three and seem more than half disposed to stand out in consequence. The foreman smiles, and puts up his watch:--"Well, gentlemen, what do we say, plaintiff or defendant, gentlemen?
It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.
It is not at the table, but in prison, that you learn who your true friends are.
It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.
I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky.
The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.
The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
One man meets an infamous punishment for that crime which confers a diadem upon another.
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.
Some laws of state aimed at curbing crime are even more criminal.
Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.
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.
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.
A variety in punishment is of utility, as well as a proportion.
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.
You utter a vow, or forge a signature, and you may find yourself bound for life to a monastery, a woman, or prison.
Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future lives and crimes to society.
