Quotes

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.

The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.

Crime is a logical extension of the sort of behavior that often [is] considered perfectly respectable in legitimate business.

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.

Justice renders to every one his due.

Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.

Self is the only prison that can bind the soul.

To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.

Wicked deeds are generally done, even with impunity, for the mere desire of occupation.

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.

I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky.

I have been studying how I may compare This prison where I live unto the world; And, for because the world is populous, And here is not a creature but myself, I cannot do it. Yet I'll hammer it out.

A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.

Prison, dungeons, blessed places where evil is impossible because they are the crossroads of all the evil in the world. One cannot commit evil in hell.

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.

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

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

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.

The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.

There are dreadful punishments enacted against thieves; but it were much better to make such good provisions, by which every man might be put in a method how to live, and so to be preserved from the fatal necessity of stealing and dying for it.

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.

How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.

Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.

If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.

Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our duty is to furnish it well.