No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
Wicked deeds are generally done, even with impunity, for the mere desire of occupation.
Steal goods and you’ll go to prison, steal lands and you are a king.
If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.
If you share the crime of your friend, you make it your own.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
Written laws are like spiders' webs, and will, like them, only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful will easily break through them.
There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.
What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor.
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.
There is no greater punishment of wickedness that that it is dissatisfied with itself and its deeds.
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.
It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.
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.
We have initiated programs for re-entry offenders, since some 500,000 to 600,000 offenders will come out of prison each year for the next three or four years. We want to have positive alternatives when they come back to the community.
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.
Justice renders to every one his due.
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?
Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
No crime has been without a precedent.
I can work for the Lord in or out of prison.
Society has used the juvenile courts to create a caste system where there are throw-away people.
~James Bell
