A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.
It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
One crime has to be concealed by another.
Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.
Trial by jury itself, instead of being a security to persons who are accused, shall be a delusion, a mockery, and a snare.
In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.
We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.
Any punishment that does not correct, that can merely rouse rebellion in whoever has to endure it, is a piece of gratuitous infamy which makes those who impose it more guilty in the eyes of humanity, good sense and reason, nay a hundred times more guilty than the victim on whom the punishment is inflicted.
One of the problems that the marijuana reform movement consistently faces is that everyone wants to talk about what marijuana does, but no one ever wants to look at what marijuana prohibition does. Marijuana never kicks down your door in the middle of the night. Marijuana never locks up sick and dying people, does not suppress medical research, does not peek in bedroom windows.
The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.
The only effect of public punishment is to show the rabble how bravely it can be borne; and that every one who hath lost a toe-nail hath suffered worse.
Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.
A variety in punishment is of utility, as well as a proportion.
No crime has been without a precedent.
Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X came out of prison stronger.
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.
I was in prison, and you came unto me. Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.
~(Jesus Christ) Matthew 25:36, 40
What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor.
The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.
The number of laws is constantly growing in all countries and, owing to this, what is called crime is very often not a crime at all, for it contains no element of violence or harm.
There is no peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war - at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.
I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice.
