Quotes

Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.

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

If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.

Some laws of state aimed at curbing crime are even more criminal.

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

Shyness is the prison of the heart.

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

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

Written laws are like spiders' webs, and will, like them, only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful will easily break through them.

When you are younger you get blamed for crimes you never committed and when you're older you begin to get credit for virtues you never possessed. It evens itself out.

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

Three hundred years ago a prisoner condemned to the Tower of London carved on the wall of his cell this sentiment to keep up his spirits during his long imprisonment: “It is not adversity that kills, but the impatience with which we bear adversity.”

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.

One crime is everything; two nothing.

The contagion of crime is like that of the plague. Criminals collected together corrupt each other; they are worse than ever when at the termination of their punishment they re-enter society.

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

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.

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

We shall not yield to violence. We shall not be deprived of union freedoms. We shall never agree with sending people to prison for their convictions.

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.

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

In my country we go to prison first and then become President.

On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break.

It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.