Quotes

They're not supposed to show prison films in prison. Especially ones that are about escaping.

The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.

To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.

Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.

Self is the only prison that can bind the soul.

I never told a victim story about my imprisonment. Instead, I told a transformation story - about how prison changed my outlook, about how I saw that communication, truth, and trust are at the heart of power.

What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor.

We who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments.

To trial bring her stolen charms, and let her prison be my arms.

Forgiveness, that noblest of all self-denial, is a virtue which he alone who can practise in himself can willingly believe in another.

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.

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.

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

Here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to be to restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work.

Women now have choices. They can be married, not married, have a job, not have a job, be married with children, unmarried with children. Men have the same choice we've always had: work, or prison.

Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.

The world is a prison in which solitary confinement is preferable.

I have never been contained except I made the prison.

We have initiated programs for re-entry offenders, since some 500,000 to 600,000 offenders will come out of prison each year for the next three or four years. We want to have positive alternatives when they come back to the community.

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.

A country is in a bad state, which is governed only by laws; because a thousand things occur for which laws cannot provide, and where authority ought to interpose.

Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.

It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their own kind.

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.