Quotes

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.

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

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

There's no greater threat to our independence, to our cherished freedoms and personal liberties than the continual, relentless injection of these insidious poisons into our system. We must decide whether we cherish independence from drugs, without which there is no freedom.

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

So justice while she winks at crimes, Stumbles on innocence sometimes.

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.

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

It is hard, but it is excellent, to find the right knowledge of when correction is necessary and when grace doth most avail.

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

Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.

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.

To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.

In jail a man has no personality. He is a minor disposal problem and a few entries on reports. Nobody cares who loves or hates him, what he looks like, what he did with his life. Nobody reacts to him unless he gives trouble. Nobody abuses him. All that is asked of him is that he go quietly to the right cell and remain quiet when he gets there. There is nothing to fight against, nothing to be mad at. The jailers are quiet men without animosity or sadism.

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

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.

A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.

We're in a war. People who blast some pot on a casual basis are guilty of treason.

Virtue pardons the wicked, as the sandal-tree perfumes the axe which strikes it.

What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor.

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.

Forgiveness, that noblest of all self-denial, is a virtue which he alone who can practise in himself can willingly believe in another.

Crime is a logical extension of the sort of behavior that often [is] considered perfectly respectable in legitimate business.

I am an expert of electricity. My father occupied the chair of applied electricity at the state prison.