Crimes generally punish themselves.
One man meets an infamous punishment for that crime which confers a diadem upon another.
Trial by jury itself, instead of being a security to persons who are accused, shall be a delusion, a mockery, and a snare.
Steal goods and you’ll go to prison, steal lands and you are a king.
Forgiveness, that noblest of all self-denial, is a virtue which he alone who can practise in himself can willingly believe in another.
Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.
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.
It is true you cannot eat freedom and you cannot power machinery with democracy. But then neither can political prisoners turn on the light in the cells of a dictatorship.
What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor.
Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.
If you treat prisoners well, they will be less angry, less inclined to violence inside prison, less likely to provoke violent actions by guards, less likely to have reason to file brutality lawsuits that cost taxpayers a bundle and waste administrators' time. And most important, well-treated prisoners will be less likely to leave prison angrier, more vicious and more inclined to criminal behavior than when they went in.
It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.
We're in a war. People who blast some pot on a casual basis are guilty of treason.
Reality becomes a prison to those who can’t get out of it.
In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
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.
The torment of human frustration, whatever its immediate cause, is the knowledge that the self is in prison, its vital force and 'mangled mind' leaking away in lonely, wasteful self-conflict.
Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.
One crime has to be concealed by another.
The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.
The difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion is the thickness of a prison walls.
Wherever any one is against his will, that is to him a prison.
We are prisoners of ideas.
