Quotes

Prison makes you a better judge of character. You pick up on people much faster.

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

When is conduct a crime, and when is a crime not a crime? When Somebody Up There -- a monarch, a dictator, a Pope, a legislator -- so decrees.

Whatever is worthy to be loved for anything is worthy of preservation. A wise and dispassionate legislator, if any such should ever arise among men, will not condemn to death him who has done or is likely to do more service than injury to society. Blocks and gibbets are the nearest objects with legislators, and their business is never with hopes or with virtues.

In prison, you get the chance to see who really loves you.

Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.

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

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

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

It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.

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

The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.

Before we can diminish our sufferings from the ill-controlled aggressive assaults of fellow citizens, we must renounce the philosophy of punishment, the obsolete, vengeful penal attitude. In its place we would seek a comprehensive, constructive social attitude - therapeutic in some instances, restraining in some instances, but preventive in its total social impact. In the last analysis this becomes a question of personal morals and values. No matter how glorified or how piously disguised, vengeance as a human motive must be personally repudiated by each and every one of us.

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.

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.

It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.

The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.

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

Adversities such as being homeless and going to prison has made many people stronger.

It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their own kind.

Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future lives and crimes to society.

Money will determine whether the accused goes to prison or walks out of the courtroom a free man.

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.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.