Quotes

It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.

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

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.

If two people fight on the street, whose fault is it? Who is the criminal? It is the government’s responsibility because the government has not educated the people to not make mistakes. The people have inadequate, incompetent education, so they make mistakes! It is such a fraud.

Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.

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.

When is conduct a crime, and when is a crime not a crime? When Somebody Up There -- a monarch, a dictator, a Pope, a legislator -- so decrees.

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

No crime has been without a precedent.

Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts.

I have been studying how I may compare this prison where I live unto the world; Shut up in the prison of their own consciences.

Law is merely the expression of the will of the strongest for the time being, and therefore laws have no fixity, but shift from generation to generation.

Crimes generally punish themselves.

Faults of the head are punished in this world, those of the heart in another; but as most of our vices are compound, so also is their punishment.

The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.

The torment of human frustration, whatever its immediate cause, is the knowledge that the self is in prison, its vital force and 'mangled mind' leaking away in lonely, wasteful self-conflict.

One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.

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

Adversities such as being homeless and going to prison has made many people stronger.

Written laws are like spiders' webs, and will, like them, only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful will easily break through them.

Whatever is worthy to be loved for anything is worthy of preservation. A wise and dispassionate legislator, if any such should ever arise among men, will not condemn to death him who has done or is likely to do more service than injury to society. Blocks and gibbets are the nearest objects with legislators, and their business is never with hopes or with virtues.

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

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

Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.

I know not whether laws be right, or whether laws be wrong; All that we know who lie in gaol is that the wall is strong; And that each day is like a year, a year whose days are long.