Quotes

Crimes generally punish themselves.

I have never been contained except I made the prison.

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

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.

I am an expert of electricity. My father occupied the chair of applied electricity at the state prison.

I can tell you this on a stack of Bibles: prisons are archaic, brutal, unregenerative, overcrowded hell holes where the inmates are treated like animals with absolutely not one humane thought given to what they are going to do once they are released. You're an animal in a cage and you're treated like one.

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.”

When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.

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.

Some laws of state aimed at curbing crime are even more criminal.

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.

Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future lives and crimes to society.

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.

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.

By noiselessly going to a prison a civil-resister ensures a calm atmosphere.

I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice.

They're not supposed to show prison films in prison. Especially ones that are about escaping.

There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.

To be at peace in crime! Ah, who can thus flatter himself.

It is safer that a bad man should not be accused, than that he should be acquitted.

A variety in punishment is of utility, as well as a proportion.

Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.

The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.

The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They keep returning to the same things.