Quotes

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.

Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.

Trial by jury itself, instead of being a security to persons who are accused, shall be a delusion, a mockery, and a snare.

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

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.

They took away my money, my family, and my security. Why couldn't they destroy my ideas? We will question them in court tomorrow as we trigger The Revolution of all revolutions!

Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.

Experts and the educated elite have replaced what worked with what sounded good. Society was far more civilized before they took over our schools, prisons, welfare programs, police departments and courts. It's high time we ran these people out of our lives and went back to common sense.

Prosecution I have managed to avoid; but I have been arrested, charged in a police court, have refused to be bound over, and thereupon have been unconditionally released - to my great regret; for I have always wanted to know what going to prison was like.

Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.

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.

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

Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.

How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.

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.

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

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

Virtue pardons the wicked, as the sandal-tree perfumes the axe which strikes it.

We have our own system, ... and journalists in our system are not put in prison for embarrassing the government by revealing things the government might not wish to have revealed. The important thing is that our system, under which journalists can write without fear or favor, should continue.

Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X came out of prison stronger.

Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?

A sick person is a prisoner.

Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.

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.