Quotes

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.

I am an expert of electricity. My father occupied the chair of applied electricity at the state prison.

One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.

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

In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.

Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.

Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts.

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.

The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.

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.

We're in a war. People who blast some pot on a casual basis are guilty of treason.

No man survives when freedom fails. The best men rot in filthy jails, and those who cry 'appease, appease' are hanged by those they tried to please.

The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.

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

A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.

A variety in punishment is of utility, as well as a proportion.

The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business.

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

I was put into jail as I was going to the shoemaker's to get a shoe which was mended. When I was let out the next morning, I proceeded to finish my errand, and, having put on my mended shoe, joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct; and in half an hour -- for the horse was soon tackled -- was in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off, and then the State was nowhere to be seen.

I was in prison, and you came unto me. Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.
~(Jesus Christ) Matthew 25:36, 40

No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, that can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.

Extreme justice is extreme injustice.

Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.