The uneven impact of actual enforcement measures tends to mirror and reinforce more general patterns of discrimination (along socioeconomic, racial and ethnic, sexual, and perhaps generational lines) within the society. As a consequence, such enforcement (ineffective as it may be in producing conformity) almost certainly reinforces feelings of alienation already prevalent within major segments of the population.
The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.
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.
Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.
Justice renders to every one his due.
I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.
Trial by jury itself, instead of being a security to persons who are accused, shall be a delusion, a mockery, and a snare.
It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.
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.
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.
The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.
In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They keep returning to the same things.
To seek the redress of grievances by going to law, is like sheep running for shelter to a bramble bush.
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.
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?
The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
One crime has to be concealed by another.
If you want total security, go to prison. There you’re fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking…is freedom.
I know not whether laws be right, or whether laws be wrong; All that we know who lie in gaol is that the wall is strong; And that each day is like a year, a year whose days are long.
No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.
To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
Fear can be like a prison. It is, however, a self made prison. Many are imprisoned by fear. No one else can liberate them from this prison. Others may inspire them but they must liberate themselves.
