Quotes

Forgiveness, that noblest of all self-denial, is a virtue which he alone who can practise in himself can willingly believe in another.

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

Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.

If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.

Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?

Prison makes you a better judge of character. You pick up on people much faster.

Fast closed with double grills
And triple gates – the cell
To wicked souls is hell;
But to a mind that's innocent
'Tis only iron, wood and stone.

Concepts of justice must have hands and feet to carry out justice in every case in the shortest possible time and the lowest possible cost. That is the challenge to every lawyer and judge in America.

The solution to our drug problem is not in incarceration.

Man is condemned to be free.

To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.

The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.

Money will determine whether the accused goes to prison or walks out of the courtroom a free man.

Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.

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

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

He had drawn many a thousand of these rations in prisons and camps, and though he'd never had an opportunity to weight them on scales, and although, being a man of timid nature, he knew no way of standing up for his rights, he, like every other prisoner, had discovered long ago that honest weight was never to be found in the bread-cutting. There was short weight in every ration. The only point was how short. So every day you took a look to soothe your soul - today, maybe, they haven't snitched any.

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.

Fear can be like a prison. It is, however, a self made prison. Many are imprisoned by fear. No one else can liberate them from this prison. Others may inspire them but they must liberate themselves.

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.

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.

Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.

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.

Whatever you think of de Sade, he was a complex figure and we should not look for easy answers with him. He was, strangely perhaps, against the death penalty, and he was never put in prison for murders or anything like that.

Extreme justice is extreme injustice.