Quotes

Crimes generally punish themselves.

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!

The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.

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

Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.

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

Every instance of a man's suffering the penalty of the law is an instance of the failure of that penalty in effecting its purpose, which is to deter.

I can tell you this on a stack of Bibles: prisons are archaic, brutal, unregenerative, overcrowded hell holes where the inmates are treated like animals with absolutely not one humane thought given to what they are going to do once they are released. You're an animal in a cage and you're treated like one.

The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.

No man survives when freedom fails. The best men rot in filthy jails, and those who cry 'appease, appease' are hanged by those they tried to please.

To seek the redress of grievances by going to law, is like sheep running for shelter to a bramble bush.

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

Show me the prison, Show me the jail, Show me the prisoner whose life has gone stale. And I'll show you a young man with so many reasons why And there, but for fortune, go you or I.

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.

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.

Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.

There is a point at which even justice does injury.

Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.

Prison makes you a better judge of character. You pick up on people much faster.

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

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.

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

I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky.

I was put into jail as I was going to the shoemaker's to get a shoe which was mended. When I was let out the next morning, I proceeded to finish my errand, and, having put on my mended shoe, joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct; and in half an hour -- for the horse was soon tackled -- was in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off, and then the State was nowhere to be seen.