Quotes

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

Concepts of justice must have hands and feet to carry out justice in every case in the shortest possible time and the lowest possible cost. That is the challenge to every lawyer and judge in America.

It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.

I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.

He had drawn many a thousand of these rations in prisons and camps, and though he'd never had an opportunity to weight them on scales, and although, being a man of timid nature, he knew no way of standing up for his rights, he, like every other prisoner, had discovered long ago that honest weight was never to be found in the bread-cutting. There was short weight in every ration. The only point was how short. So every day you took a look to soothe your soul - today, maybe, they haven't snitched any.

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

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

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

Well does Heaven have care that no man secures happiness by crime.

They took away my money, my family, and my security. Why couldn't they destroy my ideas? We will question them in court tomorrow as we trigger The Revolution of all revolutions!

I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.

Women now have choices. They can be married, not married, have a job, not have a job, be married with children, unmarried with children. Men have the same choice we've always had: work, or prison.

Hanging was the worst use a man could be put to.

It was only when I lay there on the rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not between states nor between social classes nor between political parties, but right through every human heart, through all human hearts. And that is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me, bless you, prison, for having been a part of my life.

I have been studying how I may compare this prison where I live unto the world; Shut up in the prison of their own consciences.

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!

Crime succeeds by sudden despatch; honest counsels gain vigor by delay.

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

Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.

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.

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

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.

Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.

Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X came out of prison stronger.