Written laws are like spiders' webs, and will, like them, only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful will easily break through them.
I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.
The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They keep returning to the same things.
Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.
There is a point at which even justice does injury.
You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.
In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.
Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.
If you want total security, go to prison. There you’re fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking…is freedom.
Women now have choices. They can be married, not married, have a job, not have a job, be married with children, unmarried with children. Men have the same choice we've always had: work, or prison.
The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.
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
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.
One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.
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.
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.
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.
It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.
Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.
In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.
To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.
Shyness is the prison of the heart.
Virtue pardons the wicked, as the sandal-tree perfumes the axe which strikes it.
Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.
