Quotes

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

We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.

Wherever any one is against his will, that is to him a prison.

The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They keep returning to the same things.

The best situation of all, and one frequently utilized, is for jails and prisons to allow volunteer ministers of all faiths to enter prisons and offer their services to the inmates who want them. That way, the religious needs of inmates are met but without government funds being spent.

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

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.

To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.

Before we can diminish our sufferings from the ill-controlled aggressive assaults of fellow citizens, we must renounce the philosophy of punishment, the obsolete, vengeful penal attitude. In its place we would seek a comprehensive, constructive social attitude - therapeutic in some instances, restraining in some instances, but preventive in its total social impact. In the last analysis this becomes a question of personal morals and values. No matter how glorified or how piously disguised, vengeance as a human motive must be personally repudiated by each and every one of us.

Women now have choices. They can be married, not married, have a job, not have a job, be married with children, unmarried with children. Men have the same choice we've always had: work, or prison.

It is not at the table, but in prison, that you learn who your true friends are.

There is no peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war - at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.

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.

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

A sick person is a prisoner.

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.

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%.

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

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

The severest justice may not always be the best policy.

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

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

Fast closed with double grills
And triple gates – the cell
To wicked souls is hell;
But to a mind that's innocent
'Tis only iron, wood and stone.

If you strike at, imprison, or kill us, out of our prisons or graves we will still evoke a spirit that will thwart you, and perhaps, raise a force that will destroy you! We defy you! Do your worst!

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