Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.
If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.
It is true you cannot eat freedom and you cannot power machinery with democracy. But then neither can political prisoners turn on the light in the cells of a dictatorship.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.
History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
Reality becomes a prison to those who can’t get out of it.
Show me the prison, Show me the jail, Show me the prisoner whose life has gone stale. And I'll show you a young man with so many reasons why And there, but for fortune, go you or I.
Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.
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.
Pardon is the virtue of victory.
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.
Every crime has, in the moment of its perpetration, Its own avenging angel--dark misgiving, An ominous sinking at the inmost heart.
Self is the only prison that can bind the soul.
While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.
I sometimes wish that people would put a little more emphasis upon the observance of the law than they do upon its enforcement.
Well does Heaven have care that no man secures happiness by crime.
He was a first-time nonviolent possible offender, ... And under the mandatory minimums, he was put in prison for 15 years. Not only does the punishment not fit the crime, but the mandatory minimums don't give judges any discretion to look at the background of the case, to read into the specifics of the case. I don't know a judge who really is in favor of the mandatory minimums.
One crime is everything; two nothing.
The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.
A sick person is a prisoner.
There are few better measures of the concern a society has for its individual members and its own well being than the way it handles criminals.
Forgiveness, that noblest of all self-denial, is a virtue which he alone who can practise in himself can willingly believe in another.
Do not lay on the multitude the blame that is due to a few.
In prison, you get the chance to see who really loves you.
