Quotes

Organized crime in America takes in over forty billion dollars a year. This is quite a profitable sum, especially when one considers that the Mafia spends very little for office supplies.

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.

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

It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.

Women have worked hard; starved in prison; given of their time and lives that we might sit in the House of Commons and take part in the legislating of this country.

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

A sick person is a prisoner.

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.

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.

We who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments.

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.

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.

The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.

One man meets an infamous punishment for that crime which confers a diadem upon another.

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

It is certain that the study of human psychology, if it were undertaken exclusively in prisons, would also lead to misrepresentation and absurd generalizations.

It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.

I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.

The solution to our drug problem is not in incarceration.

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

The best situation of all, and one frequently utilized, is for jails and prisons to allow volunteer ministers of all faiths to enter prisons and offer their services to the inmates who want them. That way, the religious needs of inmates are met but without government funds being spent.

The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.

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

The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.