Quotes

Any punishment that does not correct, that can merely rouse rebellion in whoever has to endure it, is a piece of gratuitous infamy which makes those who impose it more guilty in the eyes of humanity, good sense and reason, nay a hundred times more guilty than the victim on whom the punishment is inflicted.

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.

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

In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.

I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.

Here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to be to restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work.

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

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

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!

We shall not yield to violence. We shall not be deprived of union freedoms. We shall never agree with sending people to prison for their convictions.

Taught from infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.

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

Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.

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

There is a point at which even justice does injury.

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.

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

One crime has to be concealed by another.

Adversities such as being homeless and going to prison has made many people stronger.

The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.

The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.

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

Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.

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!

A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.