Quotes

The only effect of public punishment is to show the rabble how bravely it can be borne; and that every one who hath lost a toe-nail hath suffered worse.

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.

He who profits by a crime commits it.

We shall fight against them, throw them in prisons and destroy them.

The severest justice may not always be the best policy.

Federal prison, if you get any of it, you're going to have to do 85% of it. And the reason why I called it that is because I had a friend who got sent to the federal joint and his whole... it wasn't about him being in jail. He cried about the 85%.

One man meets an infamous punishment for that crime which confers a diadem upon another.

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

It is true you cannot eat freedom and you cannot power machinery with democracy. But then neither can political prisoners turn on the light in the cells of a dictatorship.

A man who has no excuse for a crime, is indeed defenseless!

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

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

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.

It is safer that a bad man should not be accused, than that he should be acquitted.

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

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.

In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.

I can work for the Lord in or out of prison.

We have our own system, ... and journalists in our system are not put in prison for embarrassing the government by revealing things the government might not wish to have revealed. The important thing is that our system, under which journalists can write without fear or favor, should continue.

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.

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.

Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.

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.

It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.

No crime has been without a precedent.