No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, that can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
A sick person is a prisoner.
Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
It is safer that a bad man should not be accused, than that he should be acquitted.
It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.
Law is merely the expression of the will of the strongest for the time being, and therefore laws have no fixity, but shift from generation to generation.
Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.
To trial bring her stolen charms, and let her prison be my arms.
I sometimes wish that people would put a little more emphasis upon the observance of the law than they do upon its enforcement.
In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.
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.
The severest justice may not always be the best policy.
Every crime has, in the moment of its perpetration, Its own avenging angel--dark misgiving, An ominous sinking at the inmost heart.
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.
The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.
I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up...I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through, before they could get to be as free as I was.
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.
To be at peace in crime! Ah, who can thus flatter himself.
Every instance of a man's suffering the penalty of the law is an instance of the failure of that penalty in effecting its purpose, which is to deter.
Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.
I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.
No man survives when freedom fails. The best men rot in filthy jails, and those who cry 'appease, appease' are hanged by those they tried to please.
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.
What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor.
