Quotes

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

It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.

Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them.

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.

One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.

Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.

We have our own system, ... and journalists in our system are not put in prison for embarrassing the government by revealing things the government might not wish to have revealed. The important thing is that our system, under which journalists can write without fear or favor, should continue.

Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X came out of prison stronger.

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

In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.

Since 1957, black people have experienced double-digit unemployment - in good times and bad times. Look at the population of African Americans in prison. They represent more than half the population of prisoners in the country, 55 percent of those on death row.

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.

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

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

Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.

As we grow in wisdom, we pardon more freely.

One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.

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

Trial by jury itself, instead of being a security to persons who are accused, shall be a delusion, a mockery, and a snare.

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

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

Some laws of state aimed at curbing crime are even more criminal.

Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

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

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