Quotes

He who opens a school door, closes a prison.

The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.

Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.

I just remember that disturbing feeling of walking into that prison, the complete loss of privacy, the complete loss of stimulation, dignity.

To seek the redress of grievances by going to law, is like sheep running for shelter to a bramble bush.

If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.

I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.

Vices are not crimes.

Any punishment that does not correct, that can merely rouse rebellion in whoever has to endure it, is a piece of gratuitous infamy which makes those who impose it more guilty in the eyes of humanity, good sense and reason, nay a hundred times more guilty than the victim on whom the punishment is inflicted.

In my country we go to prison first and then become President.

Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.

The number of laws is constantly growing in all countries and, owing to this, what is called crime is very often not a crime at all, for it contains no element of violence or harm.

Federal prison, if you get any of it, you're going to have to do 85% of it. And the reason why I called it that is because I had a friend who got sent to the federal joint and his whole... it wasn't about him being in jail. He cried about the 85%.

The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.

I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky.

Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.

The world is a prison in which solitary confinement is preferable.

A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.

They were being driven to a prison, through no fault of their own, in all probability for life. In comparison, how much easier it would be to walk to the gallows than to this tomb of living horrors!

Trial by jury itself, instead of being a security to persons who are accused, shall be a delusion, a mockery, and a snare.

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.

It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.

Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.

The solution to our drug problem is not in incarceration.

I can tell you this on a stack of Bibles: prisons are archaic, brutal, unregenerative, overcrowded hell holes where the inmates are treated like animals with absolutely not one humane thought given to what they are going to do once they are released. You're an animal in a cage and you're treated like one.