Quotes

You utter a vow, or forge a signature, and you may find yourself bound for life to a monastery, a woman, or prison.

The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.

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

I can tell you this on a stack of Bibles: prisons are archaic, brutal, unregenerative, overcrowded hell holes where the inmates are treated like animals with absolutely not one humane thought given to what they are going to do once they are released. You're an animal in a cage and you're treated like one.

The torment of human frustration, whatever its immediate cause, is the knowledge that the self is in prison, its vital force and 'mangled mind' leaking away in lonely, wasteful self-conflict.

To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.

Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?

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.

As we grow in wisdom, we pardon more freely.

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.

The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.

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

I am an expert of electricity. My father occupied the chair of applied electricity at the state prison.

The difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion is the thickness of a prison walls.

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

Punishment, that is the justice for the unjust.

Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.

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.

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.

The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.

Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.

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

The world is a prison in which solitary confinement is preferable.

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.

When the Nazis came for the communists, I remained silent; I was not a communist. When they locked up the social democrats, I remained silent; I was not a social democrat. When they came for the trade unionists, I did not speak out; I was not a trade unionist. When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out.