Quotes

Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.

They were being driven to a prison, through no fault of their own, in all probability for life. In comparison, how much easier it would be to walk to the gallows than to this tomb of living horrors!

Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.

Organized crime in America takes in over forty billion dollars a year. This is quite a profitable sum, especially when one considers that the Mafia spends very little for office supplies.

Prison, dungeons, blessed places where evil is impossible because they are the crossroads of all the evil in the world. One cannot commit evil in hell.

The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.

Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.

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.

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.

No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.

Any punishment that does not correct, that can merely rouse rebellion in whoever has to endure it, is a piece of gratuitous infamy which makes those who impose it more guilty in the eyes of humanity, good sense and reason, nay a hundred times more guilty than the victim on whom the punishment is inflicted.

Fast closed with double grills
And triple gates – the cell
To wicked souls is hell;
But to a mind that's innocent
'Tis only iron, wood and stone.

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

A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards, as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.

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.

Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached.

Show me the prison, Show me the jail, Show me the prisoner whose life has gone stale. And I'll show you a young man with so many reasons why And there, but for fortune, go you or I.

Prison makes you a better judge of character. You pick up on people much faster.

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.

Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X came out of prison stronger.

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.

Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.

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

No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.

I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.