If you want total security, go to prison. There you’re fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking…is freedom.
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.
Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
No man should be judge in his own case.
Steal goods and you’ll go to prison, steal lands and you are a king.
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?
Self is the only prison that can bind the soul.
I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.
They took away my money, my family, and my security. Why couldn't they destroy my ideas? We will question them in court tomorrow as we trigger The Revolution of all revolutions!
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.
A variety in punishment is of utility, as well as a proportion.
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.
I have been studying how I may compare this prison where I live unto the world; Shut up in the prison of their own consciences.
What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.
Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.
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.
In jail a man has no personality. He is a minor disposal problem and a few entries on reports. Nobody cares who loves or hates him, what he looks like, what he did with his life. Nobody reacts to him unless he gives trouble. Nobody abuses him. All that is asked of him is that he go quietly to the right cell and remain quiet when he gets there. There is nothing to fight against, nothing to be mad at. The jailers are quiet men without animosity or sadism.
He who profits by a crime commits it.
You utter a vow, or forge a signature, and you may find yourself bound for life to a monastery, a woman, or prison.
A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards, as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.
There is no greater punishment of wickedness that that it is dissatisfied with itself and its deeds.
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.
Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.
No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
