Quotes

When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.

In prison, you get the chance to see who really loves you.

He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it.

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.

We shall not yield to violence. We shall not be deprived of union freedoms. We shall never agree with sending people to prison for their convictions.

Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.

If you want total security, go to prison. There you’re fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking…is freedom.

Before we can diminish our sufferings from the ill-controlled aggressive assaults of fellow citizens, we must renounce the philosophy of punishment, the obsolete, vengeful penal attitude. In its place we would seek a comprehensive, constructive social attitude - therapeutic in some instances, restraining in some instances, but preventive in its total social impact. In the last analysis this becomes a question of personal morals and values. No matter how glorified or how piously disguised, vengeance as a human motive must be personally repudiated by each and every one of us.

Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.

There are few better measures of the concern a society has for its individual members and its own well being than the way it handles criminals.

He was a first-time nonviolent possible offender, ... And under the mandatory minimums, he was put in prison for 15 years. Not only does the punishment not fit the crime, but the mandatory minimums don't give judges any discretion to look at the background of the case, to read into the specifics of the case. I don't know a judge who really is in favor of the mandatory minimums.

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

So justice while she winks at crimes, Stumbles on innocence sometimes.

Wherever any one is against his will, that is to him a prison.

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.

We are prisoners of ideas.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

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. I did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar.

To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.

No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, that can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.

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

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

Money will determine whether the accused goes to prison or walks out of the courtroom a free man.

The severest justice may not always be the best policy.

I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky.