Quotes

No man survives when freedom fails. The best men rot in filthy jails, and those who cry 'appease, appease' are hanged by those they tried to please.

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

Reality becomes a prison to those who can’t get out of it.

One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.

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

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

To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.

He was a first-time nonviolent possible offender, ... And under the mandatory minimums, he was put in prison for 15 years. Not only does the punishment not fit the crime, but the mandatory minimums don't give judges any discretion to look at the background of the case, to read into the specifics of the case. I don't know a judge who really is in favor of the mandatory minimums.

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

If two people fight on the street, whose fault is it? Who is the criminal? It is the government’s responsibility because the government has not educated the people to not make mistakes. The people have inadequate, incompetent education, so they make mistakes! It is such a fraud.

While crime is punished it yet increases.

Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our duty is to furnish it well.

There are few better measures of the concern a society has for its individual members and its own well being than the way it handles criminals.

Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.

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

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.

Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.

I was in prison, and you came unto me. Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.
~(Jesus Christ) Matthew 25:36, 40

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

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

By noiselessly going to a prison a civil-resister ensures a calm atmosphere.

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

He who profits by a crime commits it.

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

Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.