Quotes

Every crime has, in the moment of its perpetration, Its own avenging angel--dark misgiving, An ominous sinking at the inmost heart.

I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.

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.

It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.

The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They keep returning to the same things.

One crime is everything; two nothing.

We shall fight against them, throw them in prisons and destroy them.

Nor stony tower, nor walls of beaten brass, Nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron, Can be retentive to the strength of spirit; But life, being weary of these worldly bars, Never lacks power to dismiss itself.

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.

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

Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.

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.

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

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

Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our duty is to furnish it well.

What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.

On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break.

If it's near dinner-time, the foreman takes out his watch when the jury has retired, and says: "Dear me, gentlemen, ten minutes to five, I declare! I dine at five, gentlemen." "So do I," says everybody else, except two men who ought to have dined at three and seem more than half disposed to stand out in consequence. The foreman smiles, and puts up his watch:--"Well, gentlemen, what do we say, plaintiff or defendant, gentlemen?

To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.

The public have more interest in the punishment of an injury than he who receives it.

The only effect of public punishment is to show the rabble how bravely it can be borne; and that every one who hath lost a toe-nail hath suffered worse.

The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.

There is no peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war - at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.

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.

The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.