Quotes

One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.

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

Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X came out of prison stronger.

There is a point at which even justice does injury.

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.

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

Here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to be to restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work.

The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business.

Women have worked hard; starved in prison; given of their time and lives that we might sit in the House of Commons and take part in the legislating of this country.

Taught from infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.

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

Care should be taken that the punishment does not exceed the guilt; and also that some men do not suffer for offenses for which others are not even indicted.

The contagion of crime is like that of the plague. Criminals collected together corrupt each other; they are worse than ever when at the termination of their punishment they re-enter society.

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

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

I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.

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.

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.

The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.

We have our own system, ... and journalists in our system are not put in prison for embarrassing the government by revealing things the government might not wish to have revealed. The important thing is that our system, under which journalists can write without fear or favor, should continue.

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

The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.

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

A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.

Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilization.