Quotes

In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.

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

Since 1957, black people have experienced double-digit unemployment - in good times and bad times. Look at the population of African Americans in prison. They represent more than half the population of prisoners in the country, 55 percent of those on death row.

Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

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

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

A country is in a bad state, which is governed only by laws; because a thousand things occur for which laws cannot provide, and where authority ought to interpose.

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

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.

Pardon is the virtue of victory.

On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break.

The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.

I sometimes wish that people would put a little more emphasis upon the observance of the law than they do upon its enforcement.

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

He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it.

Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached.

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

It is certain that the study of human psychology, if it were undertaken exclusively in prisons, would also lead to misrepresentation and absurd generalizations.

Every instance of a man's suffering the penalty of the law is an instance of the failure of that penalty in effecting its purpose, which is to deter.

The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.

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

The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business.

I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice.

One crime is everything; two nothing.

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