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.
Do not lay on the multitude the blame that is due to a few.
The only effect of public punishment is to show the rabble how bravely it can be borne; and that every one who hath lost a toe-nail hath suffered worse.
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.
He who opens a school door, closes a prison.
No man survives when freedom fails. The best men rot in filthy jails, and those who cry 'appease, appease' are hanged by those they tried to please.
Forgiveness, that noblest of all self-denial, is a virtue which he alone who can practise in himself can willingly believe in another.
Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.
To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.
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.
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.
If two people fight on the street, whose fault is it? Who is the criminal? It is the government’s responsibility because the government has not educated the people to not make mistakes. The people have inadequate, incompetent education, so they make mistakes! It is such a fraud.
The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
Body is a home, a prison and a grave.
A sick person is a prisoner.
Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.
To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.
It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.
The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.
It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.
One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.
Law is merely the expression of the will of the strongest for the time being, and therefore laws have no fixity, but shift from generation to generation.
Whatever is worthy to be loved for anything is worthy of preservation. A wise and dispassionate legislator, if any such should ever arise among men, will not condemn to death him who has done or is likely to do more service than injury to society. Blocks and gibbets are the nearest objects with legislators, and their business is never with hopes or with virtues.
On average, drug prisoners spend more time in federal prison than rapists, who often get out on early release because of the overcrowding in prison caused by the Drug War.
