Quotes

It is impossible to go through life without trust: That is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.

They're not supposed to show prison films in prison. Especially ones that are about escaping.

The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business.

Women now have choices. They can be married, not married, have a job, not have a job, be married with children, unmarried with children. Men have the same choice we've always had: work, or prison.

When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.

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

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

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.

To be at peace in crime! Ah, who can thus flatter himself.

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.

Before we can diminish our sufferings from the ill-controlled aggressive assaults of fellow citizens, we must renounce the philosophy of punishment, the obsolete, vengeful penal attitude. In its place we would seek a comprehensive, constructive social attitude - therapeutic in some instances, restraining in some instances, but preventive in its total social impact. In the last analysis this becomes a question of personal morals and values. No matter how glorified or how piously disguised, vengeance as a human motive must be personally repudiated by each and every one of us.

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

Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.

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.

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.

When it comes to freedom, we are but prisoners of our own desires.

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.

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.

There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.

He was a first-time nonviolent possible offender, ... And under the mandatory minimums, he was put in prison for 15 years. Not only does the punishment not fit the crime, but the mandatory minimums don't give judges any discretion to look at the background of the case, to read into the specifics of the case. I don't know a judge who really is in favor of the mandatory minimums.

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

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.

To seek the redress of grievances by going to law, is like sheep running for shelter to a bramble bush.

It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.

He who profits by a crime commits it.