Quotes

There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and 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.

Vices are not crimes.

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

He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it.

They were being driven to a prison, through no fault of their own, in all probability for life. In comparison, how much easier it would be to walk to the gallows than to this tomb of living horrors!

Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them.

Prison, dungeons, blessed places where evil is impossible because they are the crossroads of all the evil in the world. One cannot commit evil in hell.

Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.

Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.

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

The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.

Society has used the juvenile courts to create a caste system where there are throw-away people.

I never told a victim story about my imprisonment. Instead, I told a transformation story - about how prison changed my outlook, about how I saw that communication, truth, and trust are at the heart of power.

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.

Every instance of a man's suffering the penalty of the law is an instance of the failure of that penalty in effecting its purpose, which is to deter.

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.

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

Faults of the head are punished in this world, those of the heart in another; but as most of our vices are compound, so also is their punishment.

To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.

Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.

Prosecution I have managed to avoid; but I have been arrested, charged in a police court, have refused to be bound over, and thereupon have been unconditionally released - to my great regret; for I have always wanted to know what going to prison was like.

Pardon is the virtue of victory.

If we look at Houston, which is a very environmentally toxic place, we find that it has one of the highest levels of young men going to prison and also among the highest levels of illiteracy in the country.

It is safer that a bad man should not be accused, than that he should be acquitted.