Quotes

Vices are not crimes.

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.

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.

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.

We who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments.

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

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

Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.

A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.

If you share the crime of your friend, you make it your own.

The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.

Every crime has, in the moment of its perpetration, Its own avenging angel--dark misgiving, An ominous sinking at the inmost heart.

Any punishment that does not correct, that can merely rouse rebellion in whoever has to endure it, is a piece of gratuitous infamy which makes those who impose it more guilty in the eyes of humanity, good sense and reason, nay a hundred times more guilty than the victim on whom the punishment is inflicted.

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

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.

There are few better measures of the concern a society has for its individual members and its own well being than the way it handles criminals.

It is not at the table, but in prison, that you learn who your true friends are.

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

No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, that can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.

And while God had work for Paul, he found him friends both in court and prison. Let persecutors send saints to prison, God can provide a keeper for their turn.

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

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

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.

I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up...I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through, before they could get to be as free as I was. I did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar.

I just remember that disturbing feeling of walking into that prison, the complete loss of privacy, the complete loss of stimulation, dignity.