Quotes

The only difference between me and my fellow actors is that I've spent more time in jail.

The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.

Well does Heaven have care that no man secures happiness by crime.

We shall not yield to violence. We shall not be deprived of union freedoms. We shall never agree with sending people to prison for their convictions.

Reality becomes a prison to those who can’t get out of it.

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.

Concepts of justice must have hands and feet to carry out justice in every case in the shortest possible time and the lowest possible cost. That is the challenge to every lawyer and judge in America.

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

The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.

Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X came out of prison stronger.

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.

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

Vices are not crimes.

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

The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.

Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.

I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up...I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through, before they could get to be as free as I was. I did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar.

Here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to be to restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work.

Organized crime in America takes in over forty billion dollars a year. This is quite a profitable sum, especially when one considers that the Mafia spends very little for office supplies.

Law is merely the expression of the will of the strongest for the time being, and therefore laws have no fixity, but shift from generation to generation.

I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.

A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.

Experts and the educated elite have replaced what worked with what sounded good. Society was far more civilized before they took over our schools, prisons, welfare programs, police departments and courts. It's high time we ran these people out of our lives and went back to common sense.

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

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