Quotes

Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.

We are prisoners of ideas.

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.

Prison, dungeons, blessed places where evil is impossible because they are the crossroads of all the evil in the world. One cannot commit evil in hell.

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

Well does Heaven have care that no man secures happiness by crime.

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

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

We have initiated programs for re-entry offenders, since some 500,000 to 600,000 offenders will come out of prison each year for the next three or four years. We want to have positive alternatives when they come back to the community.

He who profits by a crime commits it.

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.

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.

When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.

Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.

Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.

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.

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.

Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.

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

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

How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.

It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their own kind.

It is true you cannot eat freedom and you cannot power machinery with democracy. But then neither can political prisoners turn on the light in the cells of a dictatorship.

A sick person is a prisoner.