Here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to be to restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work.
Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.
Society has used the juvenile courts to create a caste system where there are throw-away people.
~James Bell
It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.
A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.
The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.
They're not supposed to show prison films in prison. Especially ones that are about escaping.
He who opens a school door, closes a prison.
No man should be judge in his own case.
Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilization.
Some laws of state aimed at curbing crime are even more criminal.
The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.
One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.
Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.
It is hard, but it is excellent, to find the right knowledge of when correction is necessary and when grace doth most avail.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.
Extreme justice is extreme injustice.
The mellow sweetness of pumpkin pie off a prison spoon is something you will never forget.
Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.
I am an expert of electricity. My father occupied the chair of applied electricity at the state prison.
To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.
Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our duty is to furnish it well.
I was put into jail as I was going to the shoemaker's to get a shoe which was mended. When I was let out the next morning, I proceeded to finish my errand, and, having put on my mended shoe, joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct; and in half an hour -- for the horse was soon tackled -- was in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off, and then the State was nowhere to be seen.
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.
Reality becomes a prison to those who can’t get out of it.
