I never told a victim story about my imprisonment. Instead, I told a transformation story - about how prison changed my outlook, about how I saw that communication, truth, and trust are at the heart of power.
One crime has to be concealed by another.
A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.
The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.
There is no greater punishment of wickedness that that it is dissatisfied with itself and its deeds.
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.
The contagion of crime is like that of the plague. Criminals collected together corrupt each other; they are worse than ever when at the termination of their punishment they re-enter society.
If you strike at, imprison, or kill us, out of our prisons or graves we will still evoke a spirit that will thwart you, and perhaps, raise a force that will destroy you! We defy you! Do your worst!
If you share the crime of your friend, you make it your own.
Here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to be to restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work.
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.
Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.
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.
Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.
Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.
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.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.
Wherever any one is against his will, that is to him a prison.
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.
The public have more interest in the punishment of an injury than he who receives it.
We shall fight against them, throw them in prisons and destroy them.
Man is condemned to be free.
It is true you cannot eat freedom and you cannot power machinery with democracy. But then neither can political prisoners turn on the light in the cells of a dictatorship.
