Quotes

Fast closed with double grills
And triple gates – the cell
To wicked souls is hell;
But to a mind that's innocent
'Tis only iron, wood and stone.

On average, drug prisoners spend more time in federal prison than rapists, who often get out on early release because of the overcrowding in prison caused by the Drug War.

If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.

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.

Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.

The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.

Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.

One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.

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.

One crime is everything; two nothing.

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.

Self is the only prison that can bind the soul.

Hanging was the worst use a man could be put to.

History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.

Let us remember that justice must be observed even to the lowest.

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.

Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.

A sick person is a prisoner.

The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.

I can tell you this on a stack of Bibles: prisons are archaic, brutal, unregenerative, overcrowded hell holes where the inmates are treated like animals with absolutely not one humane thought given to what they are going to do once they are released. You're an animal in a cage and you're treated like one.

Nor stony tower, nor walls of beaten brass, Nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron, Can be retentive to the strength of spirit; But life, being weary of these worldly bars, Never lacks power to dismiss itself.

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.

The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.

Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.

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