Quotes

I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.

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

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.

The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.

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

It is true you cannot eat freedom and you cannot power machinery with democracy. But then neither can political prisoners turn on the light in the cells of a dictatorship.

The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.

Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future lives and crimes to society.

The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.

There are dreadful punishments enacted against thieves; but it were much better to make such good provisions, by which every man might be put in a method how to live, and so to be preserved from the fatal necessity of stealing and dying for it.

In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.

Let us remember that justice must be observed even to the lowest.

There is no greater punishment of wickedness that that it is dissatisfied with itself and its deeds.

The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.

Prosecution I have managed to avoid; but I have been arrested, charged in a police court, have refused to be bound over, and thereupon have been unconditionally released - to my great regret; for I have always wanted to know what going to prison was like.

Hanging was the worst use a man could be put to.

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.

Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.

You utter a vow, or forge a signature, and you may find yourself bound for life to a monastery, a woman, or prison.

We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business.

It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.

In jail a man has no personality. He is a minor disposal problem and a few entries on reports. Nobody cares who loves or hates him, what he looks like, what he did with his life. Nobody reacts to him unless he gives trouble. Nobody abuses him. All that is asked of him is that he go quietly to the right cell and remain quiet when he gets there. There is nothing to fight against, nothing to be mad at. The jailers are quiet men without animosity or sadism.

Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilization.

I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice.

The only difference between me and my fellow actors is that I've spent more time in jail.