It is impossible to go through life without trust: That is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.
If we look at Houston, which is a very environmentally toxic place, we find that it has one of the highest levels of young men going to prison and also among the highest levels of illiteracy in the country.
It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.
Hanging was the worst use a man could be put to.
Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.
A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.
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.
The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.
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.
Every crime has, in the moment of its perpetration, Its own avenging angel--dark misgiving, An ominous sinking at the inmost heart.
To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.
We are prisoners of ideas.
The mellow sweetness of pumpkin pie off a prison spoon is something you will never forget.
Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.
The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They keep returning to the same things.
Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.
Money will determine whether the accused goes to prison or walks out of the courtroom a free man.
To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.
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.
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.
If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.
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.
The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.
