The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.
Reality becomes a prison to those who can’t get out of it.
Written laws are like spiders' webs, and will, like them, only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful will easily break through them.
We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business.
It is hard, but it is excellent, to find the right knowledge of when correction is necessary and when grace doth most avail.
We have our own system, ... and journalists in our system are not put in prison for embarrassing the government by revealing things the government might not wish to have revealed. The important thing is that our system, under which journalists can write without fear or favor, should continue.
Justice renders to every one his due.
I existed in a world that never is - the prison of the mind.
It is safer that a bad man should not be accused, than that he should be acquitted.
Show me the prison, Show me the jail, Show me the prisoner whose life has gone stale. And I'll show you a young man with so many reasons why And there, but for fortune, go you or I.
No crime has been without a precedent.
Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
I was put into jail as I was going to the shoemaker's to get a shoe which was mended. When I was let out the next morning, I proceeded to finish my errand, and, having put on my mended shoe, joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct; and in half an hour -- for the horse was soon tackled -- was in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off, and then the State was nowhere to be seen.
Here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to be to restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work.
He who profits by a crime commits it.
The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.
It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.
To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.
The best situation of all, and one frequently utilized, is for jails and prisons to allow volunteer ministers of all faiths to enter prisons and offer their services to the inmates who want them. That way, the religious needs of inmates are met but without government funds being spent.
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!
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.
If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.
The world itself is but a large prison, out of which some are daily led to execution.
Since 1957, black people have experienced double-digit unemployment - in good times and bad times. Look at the population of African Americans in prison. They represent more than half the population of prisoners in the country, 55 percent of those on death row.
