Quotes

When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.

To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.

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.

Since 1957, black people have experienced double-digit unemployment - in good times and bad times. Look at the population of African Americans in prison. They represent more than half the population of prisoners in the country, 55 percent of those on death row.

If you share the crime of your friend, you make it your own.

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

Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.

I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.

When the Nazis came for the communists, I remained silent; I was not a communist. When they locked up the social democrats, I remained silent; I was not a social democrat. When they came for the trade unionists, I did not speak out; I was not a trade unionist. When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out.

History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.

While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.

A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.

The contagion of crime is like that of the plague. Criminals collected together corrupt each other; they are worse than ever when at the termination of their punishment they re-enter society.

No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.

As we grow in wisdom, we pardon more freely.

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.

Wherever any one is against his will, that is to him a prison.

Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.

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

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.

The best situation of all, and one frequently utilized, is for jails and prisons to allow volunteer ministers of all faiths to enter prisons and offer their services to the inmates who want them. That way, the religious needs of inmates are met but without government funds being spent.

Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a God.

The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They keep returning to the same things.

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.

You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.