Quotes

If we look at Houston, which is a very environmentally toxic place, we find that it has one of the highest levels of young men going to prison and also among the highest levels of illiteracy in the country.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

A sick person is a prisoner.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their own kind.

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

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

No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.

I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.

Society has used the juvenile courts to create a caste system where there are throw-away people.

It is certain that the study of human psychology, if it were undertaken exclusively in prisons, would also lead to misrepresentation and absurd generalizations.

Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.

The severest justice may not always be the best policy.

The uneven impact of actual enforcement measures tends to mirror and reinforce more general patterns of discrimination (along socioeconomic, racial and ethnic, sexual, and perhaps generational lines) within the society. As a consequence, such enforcement (ineffective as it may be in producing conformity) almost certainly reinforces feelings of alienation already prevalent within major segments of the population.

Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.

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

It was only when I lay there on the rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not between states nor between social classes nor between political parties, but right through every human heart, through all human hearts. And that is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me, bless you, prison, for having been a part of my life.

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

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.

Prison, dungeons, blessed places where evil is impossible because they are the crossroads of all the evil in the world. One cannot commit evil in hell.

The public have more interest in the punishment of an injury than he who receives it.

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

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

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.

If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.