One crime is everything; two nothing.
Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.
Crime is a logical extension of the sort of behavior that often [is] considered perfectly respectable in legitimate business.
I have been studying how I may compare this prison where I live unto the world; Shut up in the prison of their own consciences.
In jail a man has no personality. He is a minor disposal problem and a few entries on reports. Nobody cares who loves or hates him, what he looks like, what he did with his life. Nobody reacts to him unless he gives trouble. Nobody abuses him. All that is asked of him is that he go quietly to the right cell and remain quiet when he gets there. There is nothing to fight against, nothing to be mad at. The jailers are quiet men without animosity or sadism.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
You utter a vow, or forge a signature, and you may find yourself bound for life to a monastery, a woman, or prison.
Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.
I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.
There is a point at which even justice does injury.
Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.
On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break.
He who profits by a crime commits it.
I am an expert of electricity. My father occupied the chair of applied electricity at the state prison.
The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.
The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.
The perfection of a thing consists in its essence; there are perfect criminals, as there are men of perfect probity.
Forgiveness, that noblest of all self-denial, is a virtue which he alone who can practise in himself can willingly believe in another.
We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business.
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.
I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.
Wicked deeds are generally done, even with impunity, for the mere desire of occupation.
If it's near dinner-time, the foreman takes out his watch when the jury has retired, and says: "Dear me, gentlemen, ten minutes to five, I declare! I dine at five, gentlemen." "So do I," says everybody else, except two men who ought to have dined at three and seem more than half disposed to stand out in consequence. The foreman smiles, and puts up his watch:--"Well, gentlemen, what do we say, plaintiff or defendant, gentlemen?
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.
