Quotes

He who profits by a crime commits it.

So justice while she winks at crimes, Stumbles on innocence sometimes.

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

He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it.

The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.

The torment of human frustration, whatever its immediate cause, is the knowledge that the self is in prison, its vital force and 'mangled mind' leaking away in lonely, wasteful self-conflict.

It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.

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

As we grow in wisdom, we pardon more freely.

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

Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.

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

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

I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.

We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.

If two people fight on the street, whose fault is it? Who is the criminal? It is the government’s responsibility because the government has not educated the people to not make mistakes. The people have inadequate, incompetent education, so they make mistakes! It is such a fraud.

In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.

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

Whatever you think of de Sade, he was a complex figure and we should not look for easy answers with him. He was, strangely perhaps, against the death penalty, and he was never put in prison for murders or anything like that.

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

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.

He who opens a school door, closes a prison.

I know not whether laws be right, or whether laws be wrong; All that we know who lie in gaol is that the wall is strong; And that each day is like a year, a year whose days are long.

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

A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards, as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.