In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.
A sick person is a prisoner.
Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.
The difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion is the thickness of a prison walls.
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.
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?
If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.
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.
To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.
I was in prison, and you came unto me. Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.
~(Jesus Christ) Matthew 25:36, 40
Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.
Fear can be like a prison. It is, however, a self made prison. Many are imprisoned by fear. No one else can liberate them from this prison. Others may inspire them but they must liberate themselves.
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.
The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.
Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.
When is conduct a crime, and when is a crime not a crime? When Somebody Up There -- a monarch, a dictator, a Pope, a legislator -- so decrees.
History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.
Justice renders to every one his due.
Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.
I existed in a world that never is - the prison of the mind.
Some laws of state aimed at curbing crime are even more criminal.
Care should be taken that the punishment does not exceed the guilt; and also that some men do not suffer for offenses for which others are not even indicted.
A country is in a bad state, which is governed only by laws; because a thousand things occur for which laws cannot provide, and where authority ought to interpose.
Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.
I have been studying how I may compare This prison where I live unto the world; And, for because the world is populous, And here is not a creature but myself, I cannot do it. Yet I'll hammer it out.
