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 utter a vow, or forge a signature, and you may find yourself bound for life to a monastery, a woman, or prison.
The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.
A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.
If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.
The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.
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.
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.
If you strike at, imprison, or kill us, out of our prisons or graves we will still evoke a spirit that will thwart you, and perhaps, raise a force that will destroy you! We defy you! Do your worst!
The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.
They're not supposed to show prison films in prison. Especially ones that are about escaping.
Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.
Every crime has, in the moment of its perpetration, Its own avenging angel--dark misgiving, An ominous sinking at the inmost heart.
To seek the redress of grievances by going to law, is like sheep running for shelter to a bramble bush.
Hanging was the worst use a man could be put to.
Justice renders to every one his due.
Since 1957, black people have experienced double-digit unemployment - in good times and bad times. Look at the population of African Americans in prison. They represent more than half the population of prisoners in the country, 55 percent of those on death row.
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.
He had drawn many a thousand of these rations in prisons and camps, and though he'd never had an opportunity to weight them on scales, and although, being a man of timid nature, he knew no way of standing up for his rights, he, like every other prisoner, had discovered long ago that honest weight was never to be found in the bread-cutting. There was short weight in every ration. The only point was how short. So every day you took a look to soothe your soul - today, maybe, they haven't snitched any.
Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.
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.”
One of the problems that the marijuana reform movement consistently faces is that everyone wants to talk about what marijuana does, but no one ever wants to look at what marijuana prohibition does. Marijuana never kicks down your door in the middle of the night. Marijuana never locks up sick and dying people, does not suppress medical research, does not peek in bedroom windows.
Pardon is the virtue of victory.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
By noiselessly going to a prison a civil-resister ensures a calm atmosphere.
