A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.
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.
I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.
It was only when I lay there on the rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not between states nor between social classes nor between political parties, but right through every human heart, through all human hearts. And that is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me, bless you, prison, for having been a part of my life.
Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.
I never told a victim story about my imprisonment. Instead, I told a transformation story - about how prison changed my outlook, about how I saw that communication, truth, and trust are at the heart of power.
Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.
Wicked deeds are generally done, even with impunity, for the mere desire of occupation.
Money will determine whether the accused goes to prison or walks out of the courtroom a free man.
To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.
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.
It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.
Body is a home, a prison and a grave.
We who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments.
The only difference between me and my fellow actors is that I've spent more time in jail.
In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.
The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.
A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
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.
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.
The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.
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.
Virtue pardons the wicked, as the sandal-tree perfumes the axe which strikes it.
