Quotes

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.

In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.

I have been studying how I may compare this prison where I live unto the world; Shut up in the prison of their own consciences.

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.

Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.

A country is in a bad state, which is governed only by laws; because a thousand things occur for which laws cannot provide, and where authority ought to interpose.

The world is a prison in which solitary confinement is preferable.

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 shall fight against them, throw them in prisons and destroy them.

I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.

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.

Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.

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

Law is merely the expression of the will of the strongest for the time being, and therefore laws have no fixity, but shift from generation to generation.

To be at peace in crime! Ah, who can thus flatter himself.

The contagion of crime is like that of the plague. Criminals collected together corrupt each other; they are worse than ever when at the termination of their punishment they re-enter society.

What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.

We're in a war. People who blast some pot on a casual basis are guilty of treason.

Written laws are like spiders' webs, and will, like them, only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful will easily break through them.

Some laws of state aimed at curbing crime are even more criminal.

Pardon is the virtue of victory.

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

The perfection of a thing consists in its essence; there are perfect criminals, as there are men of perfect probity.

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.