Quotes

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

I never told a victim story about my imprisonment. Instead, I told a transformation story - about how prison changed my outlook, about how I saw that communication, truth, and trust are at the heart of power.

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

If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.

Do not lay on the multitude the blame that is due to a few.

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

When you are younger you get blamed for crimes you never committed and when you're older you begin to get credit for virtues you never possessed. It evens itself out.

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.

The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.

The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.

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

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.

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

What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor.

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

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.

The mellow sweetness of pumpkin pie off a prison spoon is something you will never forget.

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

No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, that can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.

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.

To trial bring her stolen charms, and let her prison be my arms.

If you share the crime of your friend, you make it your own.

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

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.

Extreme justice is extreme injustice.