Quotes

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

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

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.

Three hundred years ago a prisoner condemned to the Tower of London carved on the wall of his cell this sentiment to keep up his spirits during his long imprisonment: “It is not adversity that kills, but the impatience with which we bear adversity.”

Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached.

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.

While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.

History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.

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.

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

The solution to our drug problem is not in incarceration.

In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.

Crimes generally punish themselves.

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.

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

They're not supposed to show prison films in prison. Especially ones that are about escaping.

In my country we go to prison first and then become President.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

Pardon is the virtue of victory.

Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

The best situation of all, and one frequently utilized, is for jails and prisons to allow volunteer ministers of all faiths to enter prisons and offer their services to the inmates who want them. That way, the religious needs of inmates are met but without government funds being spent.

Crime is a logical extension of the sort of behavior that often [is] considered perfectly respectable in legitimate business.

America is the land of the second chance – and when the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life.

You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.

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