Wicked deeds are generally done, even with impunity, for the mere desire of occupation.
The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business.
There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.
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.
It is certain that the study of human psychology, if it were undertaken exclusively in prisons, would also lead to misrepresentation and absurd generalizations.
So justice while she winks at crimes, Stumbles on innocence sometimes.
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.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business.
We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.
A man who has no excuse for a crime, is indeed defenseless!
The severest justice may not always be the best policy.
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?
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.
I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky.
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.
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.
Prison, dungeons, blessed places where evil is impossible because they are the crossroads of all the evil in the world. One cannot commit evil in hell.
One man meets an infamous punishment for that crime which confers a diadem upon another.
The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.
Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.
To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.
