Prison Quotes

Organized crime in America takes in over forty billion dollars a year. This is quite a profitable sum, especially when one considers that the Mafia spends very little for office supplies.

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

Crime succeeds by sudden despatch; honest counsels gain vigor by delay.

The uneven impact of actual enforcement measures tends to mirror and reinforce more general patterns of discrimination (along socioeconomic, racial and ethnic, sexual, and perhaps generational lines) within the society. As a consequence, such enforcement (ineffective as it may be in producing conformity) almost certainly reinforces feelings of alienation already prevalent within major segments of the population.

Reality becomes a prison to those who can’t get out of it.

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.

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.

Man is condemned to be free.

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

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

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

Faults of the head are punished in this world, those of the heart in another; but as most of our vices are compound, so also is their punishment.