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.
Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.
When you are younger you get blamed for crimes you never committed and when you're older you begin to get credit for virtues you never possessed. It evens itself out.
There's no greater threat to our independence, to our cherished freedoms and personal liberties than the continual, relentless injection of these insidious poisons into our system. We must decide whether we cherish independence from drugs, without which there is no freedom.
Justice renders to every one his due.
No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
To be at peace in crime! Ah, who can thus flatter himself.
Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.
Law is merely the expression of the will of the strongest for the time being, and therefore laws have no fixity, but shift from generation to generation.
If you strike at, imprison, or kill us, out of our prisons or graves we will still evoke a spirit that will thwart you, and perhaps, raise a force that will destroy you! We defy you! Do your worst!
Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?
To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.
It is safer that a bad man should not be accused, than that he should be acquitted.
They're not supposed to show prison films in prison. Especially ones that are about escaping.
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.
Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.
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.
The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.
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.
What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.
No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, that can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.
I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.
He was a first-time nonviolent possible offender, ... And under the mandatory minimums, he was put in prison for 15 years. Not only does the punishment not fit the crime, but the mandatory minimums don't give judges any discretion to look at the background of the case, to read into the specifics of the case. I don't know a judge who really is in favor of the mandatory minimums.
Money will determine whether the accused goes to prison or walks out of the courtroom a free man.
