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 penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.
To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.
Do not lay on the multitude the blame that is due to a few.
It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.
One crime is everything; two nothing.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.
What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.
I can work for the Lord in or out of prison.
In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.
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!
Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.
To seek the redress of grievances by going to law, is like sheep running for shelter to a bramble bush.
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.
While crime is punished it yet increases.
There is a point at which even justice does injury.
Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.
No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
Extreme justice is extreme injustice.
I know not whether laws be right, or whether laws be wrong; All that we know who lie in gaol is that the wall is strong; And that each day is like a year, a year whose days are long.
It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their own kind.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
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.
Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.
