Quotes

They were being driven to a prison, through no fault of their own, in all probability for life. In comparison, how much easier it would be to walk to the gallows than to this tomb of living horrors!

No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.

When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.

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.

I can work for the Lord in or out of prison.

In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.

It is hard, but it is excellent, to find the right knowledge of when correction is necessary and when grace doth most avail.

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

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.

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

Crime succeeds by sudden despatch; honest counsels gain vigor by delay.

While crime is punished it yet increases.

I was in prison, and you came unto me. Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.
~(Jesus Christ) Matthew 25:36, 40

Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.

Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.

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

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

Every instance of a man's suffering the penalty of the law is an instance of the failure of that penalty in effecting its purpose, which is to deter.

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

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

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

It is impossible to go through life without trust: That is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.