Concepts of justice must have hands and feet to carry out justice in every case in the shortest possible time and the lowest possible cost. That is the challenge to every lawyer and judge in America.
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.
We shall not yield to violence. We shall not be deprived of union freedoms. We shall never agree with sending people to prison for their convictions.
He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it.
The public have more interest in the punishment of an injury than he who receives it.
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.
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.
We're in a war. People who blast some pot on a casual basis are guilty of treason.
The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.
There are few better measures of the concern a society has for its individual members and its own well being than the way it handles criminals.
The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.
If we look at Houston, which is a very environmentally toxic place, we find that it has one of the highest levels of young men going to prison and also among the highest levels of illiteracy in the country.
Nor stony tower, nor walls of beaten brass, Nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron, Can be retentive to the strength of spirit; But life, being weary of these worldly bars, Never lacks power to dismiss itself.
He who opens a school door, closes a prison.
Self is the only prison that can bind the soul.
It is safer that a bad man should not be accused, than that he should be acquitted.
Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.
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?
Wherever any one is against his will, that is to him a prison.
A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.
Trial by jury itself, instead of being a security to persons who are accused, shall be a delusion, a mockery, and a snare.
While crime is punished it yet increases.
The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.
Adversities such as being homeless and going to prison has made many people stronger.
Women have worked hard; starved in prison; given of their time and lives that we might sit in the House of Commons and take part in the legislating of this country.
