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.
Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a God.
No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, that can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.
Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?
I am an expert of electricity. My father occupied the chair of applied electricity at the state prison.
Crime is a logical extension of the sort of behavior that often [is] considered perfectly respectable in legitimate business.
It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.
I just remember that disturbing feeling of walking into that prison, the complete loss of privacy, the complete loss of stimulation, dignity.
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.
Federal prison, if you get any of it, you're going to have to do 85% of it. And the reason why I called it that is because I had a friend who got sent to the federal joint and his whole... it wasn't about him being in jail. He cried about the 85%.
Show me the prison, Show me the jail, Show me the prisoner whose life has gone stale. And I'll show you a young man with so many reasons why And there, but for fortune, go you or I.
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.
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.
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.
Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.
Extreme justice is extreme injustice.
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.
Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X came out of prison stronger.
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.
He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it.
The only difference between me and my fellow actors is that I've spent more time in jail.
The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.
Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached.
They're not supposed to show prison films in prison. Especially ones that are about escaping.
I was put into jail as I was going to the shoemaker's to get a shoe which was mended. When I was let out the next morning, I proceeded to finish my errand, and, having put on my mended shoe, joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct; and in half an hour -- for the horse was soon tackled -- was in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off, and then the State was nowhere to be seen.
