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.
Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.
It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.
We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business.
Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.
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.
One crime is everything; two nothing.
No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, that can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.
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.
I have never been contained except I made the prison.
Steal goods and you’ll go to prison, steal lands and you are a king.
Forgiveness, that noblest of all self-denial, is a virtue which he alone who can practise in himself can willingly believe in another.
On average, drug prisoners spend more time in federal prison than rapists, who often get out on early release because of the overcrowding in prison caused by the Drug War.
Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.
The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
A man who has no excuse for a crime, is indeed defenseless!
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.
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.
Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.
Crime succeeds by sudden despatch; honest counsels gain vigor by delay.
Taught from infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.
It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.
There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.
There is a point at which even justice does injury.
