Quotes

The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.

Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.

There are few better measures of the concern a society has for its individual members and its own well being than the way it handles criminals.

I just remember that disturbing feeling of walking into that prison, the complete loss of privacy, the complete loss of stimulation, dignity.

Steal goods and you’ll go to prison, steal lands and you are a king.

Body is a home, a prison and a grave.

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.

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

When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.

Crimes generally punish themselves.

Pardon is the virtue of victory.

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

I know not whether laws be right, or whether laws be wrong; All that we know who lie in gaol is that the wall is strong; And that each day is like a year, a year whose days are long.

Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.

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.

We have initiated programs for re-entry offenders, since some 500,000 to 600,000 offenders will come out of prison each year for the next three or four years. We want to have positive alternatives when they come back to the community.

Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.

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

To be at peace in crime! Ah, who can thus flatter himself.

Forgiveness, that noblest of all self-denial, is a virtue which he alone who can practise in himself can willingly believe in another.

How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.

Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.

Show me the prison, Show me the jail, Show me the prisoner whose life has gone stale. And I'll show you a young man with so many reasons why And there, but for fortune, go you or I.

Every crime has, in the moment of its perpetration, Its own avenging angel--dark misgiving, An ominous sinking at the inmost heart.

Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.