Quotes

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

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

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.

Taught from infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.

Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.

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

Money will determine whether the accused goes to prison or walks out of the courtroom a free man.

The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business.

There is a point at which even justice does injury.

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.

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.

It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.

Steal goods and you’ll go to prison, steal lands and you are a king.

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

Pardon is the virtue of victory.

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

When is conduct a crime, and when is a crime not a crime? When Somebody Up There -- a monarch, a dictator, a Pope, a legislator -- so decrees.

Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a God.

Vices are not crimes.

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

Before we can diminish our sufferings from the ill-controlled aggressive assaults of fellow citizens, we must renounce the philosophy of punishment, the obsolete, vengeful penal attitude. In its place we would seek a comprehensive, constructive social attitude - therapeutic in some instances, restraining in some instances, but preventive in its total social impact. In the last analysis this becomes a question of personal morals and values. No matter how glorified or how piously disguised, vengeance as a human motive must be personally repudiated by each and every one of us.

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

There are dreadful punishments enacted against thieves; but it were much better to make such good provisions, by which every man might be put in a method how to live, and so to be preserved from the fatal necessity of stealing and dying for it.

The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.