Quotes

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

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

It is safer that a bad man should not be accused, than that he should be acquitted.

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

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

There is no peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war - at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.

The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.

If you want total security, go to prison. There you’re fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking…is freedom.

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.

No man should be judge in his own case.

Prison makes you a better judge of character. You pick up on people much faster.

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.

The torment of human frustration, whatever its immediate cause, is the knowledge that the self is in prison, its vital force and 'mangled mind' leaking away in lonely, wasteful self-conflict.

Since 1957, black people have experienced double-digit unemployment - in good times and bad times. Look at the population of African Americans in prison. They represent more than half the population of prisoners in the country, 55 percent of those on death row.

I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.

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

How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.

No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.

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

Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.

While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.

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

Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.

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

Every crime has, in the moment of its perpetration, Its own avenging angel--dark misgiving, An ominous sinking at the inmost heart.