Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.
We are prisoners of ideas.
To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.
I just remember that disturbing feeling of walking into that prison, the complete loss of privacy, the complete loss of stimulation, dignity.
Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.
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.
Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.
Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.
There are dreadful punishments enacted against thieves; but it were much better to make such good provisions, by which every man might be put in a method how to live, and so to be preserved from the fatal necessity of stealing and dying for it.
Extreme justice is extreme injustice.
It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.
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.
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.
A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.
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.
Prison makes you a better judge of character. You pick up on people much faster.
To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.
Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them.
Body is a home, a prison and a grave.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
Women have worked hard; starved in prison; given of their time and lives that we might sit in the House of Commons and take part in the legislating of this country.
Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.
No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, that can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.
