Quotes

So justice while she winks at crimes, Stumbles on innocence sometimes.

Whatever you think of de Sade, he was a complex figure and we should not look for easy answers with him. He was, strangely perhaps, against the death penalty, and he was never put in prison for murders or anything like that.

Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a God.

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.

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

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

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

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!

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

Federal prison, if you get any of it, you're going to have to do 85% of it. And the reason why I called it that is because I had a friend who got sent to the federal joint and his whole... it wasn't about him being in jail. He cried about the 85%.

The severest justice may not always be the best policy.

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.

Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.

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

When you are younger you get blamed for crimes you never committed and when you're older you begin to get credit for virtues you never possessed. It evens itself out.

There is a point at which even justice does injury.

Care should be taken that the punishment does not exceed the guilt; and also that some men do not suffer for offenses for which others are not even indicted.

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.

A man who has no excuse for a crime, is indeed defenseless!

Shyness is the prison of the heart.

It is true you cannot eat freedom and you cannot power machinery with democracy. But then neither can political prisoners turn on the light in the cells of a dictatorship.

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

If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.

Trial by jury itself, instead of being a security to persons who are accused, shall be a delusion, a mockery, and a snare.

In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.