Quotes

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

If two people fight on the street, whose fault is it? Who is the criminal? It is the government’s responsibility because the government has not educated the people to not make mistakes. The people have inadequate, incompetent education, so they make mistakes! It is such a fraud.

We who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments.

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

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.

Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.

The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They keep returning to the same things.

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.

A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.

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 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.

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

Pardon is the virtue of victory.

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

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.

I sometimes wish that people would put a little more emphasis upon the observance of the law than they do upon its enforcement.

The public have more interest in the punishment of an injury than he who receives it.

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.

I existed in a world that never is - the prison of the mind.

Care should be taken that the punishment does not exceed the guilt; and also that some men do not suffer for offenses for which others are not even indicted.

A sick person is a prisoner.

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

Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

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

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