We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business.
If you treat prisoners well, they will be less angry, less inclined to violence inside prison, less likely to provoke violent actions by guards, less likely to have reason to file brutality lawsuits that cost taxpayers a bundle and waste administrators' time. And most important, well-treated prisoners will be less likely to leave prison angrier, more vicious and more inclined to criminal behavior than when they went in.
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.
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.
Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.
When it comes to freedom, we are but prisoners of our own desires.
He had drawn many a thousand of these rations in prisons and camps, and though he'd never had an opportunity to weight them on scales, and although, being a man of timid nature, he knew no way of standing up for his rights, he, like every other prisoner, had discovered long ago that honest weight was never to be found in the bread-cutting. There was short weight in every ration. The only point was how short. So every day you took a look to soothe your soul - today, maybe, they haven't snitched any.
Extreme justice is extreme injustice.
The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They keep returning to the same things.
Prosecution I have managed to avoid; but I have been arrested, charged in a police court, have refused to be bound over, and thereupon have been unconditionally released - to my great regret; for I have always wanted to know what going to prison was like.
Hanging was the worst use a man could be put to.
Faults of the head are punished in this world, those of the heart in another; but as most of our vices are compound, so also is their punishment.
Do not lay on the multitude the blame that is due to a few.
The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.
Experts and the educated elite have replaced what worked with what sounded good. Society was far more civilized before they took over our schools, prisons, welfare programs, police departments and courts. It's high time we ran these people out of our lives and went back to common sense.
Concepts of justice must have hands and feet to carry out justice in every case in the shortest possible time and the lowest possible cost. That is the challenge to every lawyer and judge in America.
In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.
Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.
No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.
He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it.
We are prisoners of ideas.
The severest justice may not always be the best policy.
The uneven impact of actual enforcement measures tends to mirror and reinforce more general patterns of discrimination (along socioeconomic, racial and ethnic, sexual, and perhaps generational lines) within the society. As a consequence, such enforcement (ineffective as it may be in producing conformity) almost certainly reinforces feelings of alienation already prevalent within major segments of the population.
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.
It is hard, but it is excellent, to find the right knowledge of when correction is necessary and when grace doth most avail.
