Quotes

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

Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.

Crime is a logical extension of the sort of behavior that often [is] considered perfectly respectable in legitimate business.

He who profits by a crime commits it.

It was only when I lay there on the rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not between states nor between social classes nor between political parties, but right through every human heart, through all human hearts. And that is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me, bless you, prison, for having been a part of my life.

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

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

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

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.

How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.

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

I was put into jail as I was going to the shoemaker's to get a shoe which was mended. When I was let out the next morning, I proceeded to finish my errand, and, having put on my mended shoe, joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct; and in half an hour -- for the horse was soon tackled -- was in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off, and then the State was nowhere to be seen.

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.

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

You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.

Taught from infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.

A sick person is a prisoner.

It is certain that the study of human psychology, if it were undertaken exclusively in prisons, would also lead to misrepresentation and absurd generalizations.

A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.

Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.

No crime has been without a precedent.

Man is condemned to be free.

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

Extreme justice is extreme injustice.

Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.