Quotes

The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.

We who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments.

No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.

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

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

Vices are not crimes.

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.

Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?

The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.

I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.

Justice renders to every one his due.

Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.

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.

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 torment of human frustration, whatever its immediate cause, is the knowledge that the self is in prison, its vital force and 'mangled mind' leaking away in lonely, wasteful self-conflict.

It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.

No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.

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

I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky.

The only difference between me and my fellow actors is that I've spent more time in jail.

Law is merely the expression of the will of the strongest for the time being, and therefore laws have no fixity, but shift from generation to generation.

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.

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

Crime is a logical extension of the sort of behavior that often [is] considered perfectly respectable in legitimate business.

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