Quotes

It is not at the table, but in prison, that you learn who your true friends are.

There is no greater punishment of wickedness that that it is dissatisfied with itself and its deeds.

There are few better measures of the concern a society has for its individual members and its own well being than the way it handles criminals.

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

If we look at Houston, which is a very environmentally toxic place, we find that it has one of the highest levels of young men going to prison and also among the highest levels of illiteracy in the country.

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.

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

We are prisoners of ideas.

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

Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.

Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.

Adversities such as being homeless and going to prison has made many people stronger.

Trial by jury itself, instead of being a security to persons who are accused, shall be a delusion, a mockery, and a snare.

Wherever any one is against his will, that is to him a prison.

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

We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.

In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.

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.

In prison, you get the chance to see who really loves you.

No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.

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.

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.

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

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

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