I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.
Three hundred years ago a prisoner condemned to the Tower of London carved on the wall of his cell this sentiment to keep up his spirits during his long imprisonment: “It is not adversity that kills, but the impatience with which we bear adversity.”
America is the land of the second chance – and when the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life.
Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.
Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.
In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.
When is conduct a crime, and when is a crime not a crime? When Somebody Up There -- a monarch, a dictator, a Pope, a legislator -- so decrees.
The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.
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.
Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.
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.
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.
Pardon is the virtue of victory.
The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.
I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky.
We are prisoners of ideas.
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!
The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.
Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.
We shall fight against them, throw them in prisons and destroy them.
Prison makes you a better judge of character. You pick up on people much faster.
I have never been contained except I made the prison.
One crime is everything; two nothing.
I was in prison, and you came unto me. Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.
~(Jesus Christ) Matthew 25:36, 40
