Quotes

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

What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor.

A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards, as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.

The perfection of a thing consists in its essence; there are perfect criminals, as there are men of perfect probity.

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

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.

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.

Do not lay on the multitude the blame that is due to a few.

Steal goods and you’ll go to prison, steal lands and you are a king.

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.

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

No man should be judge in his own case.

Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached.

In jail a man has no personality. He is a minor disposal problem and a few entries on reports. Nobody cares who loves or hates him, what he looks like, what he did with his life. Nobody reacts to him unless he gives trouble. Nobody abuses him. All that is asked of him is that he go quietly to the right cell and remain quiet when he gets there. There is nothing to fight against, nothing to be mad at. The jailers are quiet men without animosity or sadism.

Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.

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

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

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

The public have more interest in the punishment of an injury than he who receives it.

If you strike at, imprison, or kill us, out of our prisons or graves we will still evoke a spirit that will thwart you, and perhaps, raise a force that will destroy you! We defy you! Do your worst!

I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice.

By noiselessly going to a prison a civil-resister ensures a calm atmosphere.

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.

Organized crime in America takes in over forty billion dollars a year. This is quite a profitable sum, especially when one considers that the Mafia spends very little for office supplies.

They're not supposed to show prison films in prison. Especially ones that are about escaping.