Quotes

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

The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.

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

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

What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor.

If you share the crime of your friend, you make it your own.

Women now have choices. They can be married, not married, have a job, not have a job, be married with children, unmarried with children. Men have the same choice we've always had: work, or prison.

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.

How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.

A variety in punishment is of utility, as well as a proportion.

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

I never told a victim story about my imprisonment. Instead, I told a transformation story - about how prison changed my outlook, about how I saw that communication, truth, and trust are at the heart of power.

The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.

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

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.

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

The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.

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.

I sometimes wish that people would put a little more emphasis upon the observance of the law than they do upon its enforcement.

Do not lay on the multitude the blame that is due to a few.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

One crime is everything; two nothing.

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.

Fast closed with double grills
And triple gates – the cell
To wicked souls is hell;
But to a mind that's innocent
'Tis only iron, wood and stone.

Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.