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.
So justice while she winks at crimes, Stumbles on innocence sometimes.
Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?
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.
Some laws of state aimed at curbing crime are even more criminal.
Whatever you think of de Sade, he was a complex figure and we should not look for easy answers with him. He was, strangely perhaps, against the death penalty, and he was never put in prison for murders or anything like that.
The only difference between me and my fellow actors is that I've spent more time in jail.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
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.
To seek the redress of grievances by going to law, is like sheep running for shelter to a bramble bush.
Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
We have initiated programs for re-entry offenders, since some 500,000 to 600,000 offenders will come out of prison each year for the next three or four years. We want to have positive alternatives when they come back to the community.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
The only effect of public punishment is to show the rabble how bravely it can be borne; and that every one who hath lost a toe-nail hath suffered worse.
I am an expert of electricity. My father occupied the chair of applied electricity at the state prison.
If it's near dinner-time, the foreman takes out his watch when the jury has retired, and says: "Dear me, gentlemen, ten minutes to five, I declare! I dine at five, gentlemen." "So do I," says everybody else, except two men who ought to have dined at three and seem more than half disposed to stand out in consequence. The foreman smiles, and puts up his watch:--"Well, gentlemen, what do we say, plaintiff or defendant, gentlemen?
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.
On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break.
To be at peace in crime! Ah, who can thus flatter himself.
It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.
The world itself is but a large prison, out of which some are daily led to execution.
Steal goods and you’ll go to prison, steal lands and you are a king.
America is the land of the second chance – and when the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life.
I can work for the Lord in or out of prison.
Society has used the juvenile courts to create a caste system where there are throw-away people.
~James Bell
