Quotes

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

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.

What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.

Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.

Prison makes you a better judge of character. You pick up on people much faster.

The uneven impact of actual enforcement measures tends to mirror and reinforce more general patterns of discrimination (along socioeconomic, racial and ethnic, sexual, and perhaps generational lines) within the society. As a consequence, such enforcement (ineffective as it may be in producing conformity) almost certainly reinforces feelings of alienation already prevalent within major segments of the population.

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.

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

If you want total security, go to prison. There you’re fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking…is freedom.

History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.

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

Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.

There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.

We are prisoners of ideas.

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.

Pardon is the virtue of victory.

If we look at Houston, which is a very environmentally toxic place, we find that it has one of the highest levels of young men going to prison and also among the highest levels of illiteracy in the country.

On average, drug prisoners spend more time in federal prison than rapists, who often get out on early release because of the overcrowding in prison caused by the Drug War.

To seek the redress of grievances by going to law, is like sheep running for shelter to a bramble bush.

I existed in a world that never is - the prison of the mind.

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

Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.

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.

There is no greater punishment of wickedness that that it is dissatisfied with itself and its deeds.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.