Quotes

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.

Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.

There are few better measures of the concern a society has for its individual members and its own well being than the way it handles criminals.

To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.

Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.

History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.

Women have worked hard; starved in prison; given of their time and lives that we might sit in the House of Commons and take part in the legislating of this country.

As we grow in wisdom, we pardon more freely.

There are dreadful punishments enacted against thieves; but it were much better to make such good provisions, by which every man might be put in a method how to live, and so to be preserved from the fatal necessity of stealing and dying for it.

I don't like being famous - it is like a prison. And driving for Ferrari would make it far worse.

One crime is everything; two nothing.

In jail a man has no personality. He is a minor disposal problem and a few entries on reports. Nobody cares who loves or hates him, what he looks like, what he did with his life. Nobody reacts to him unless he gives trouble. Nobody abuses him. All that is asked of him is that he go quietly to the right cell and remain quiet when he gets there. There is nothing to fight against, nothing to be mad at. The jailers are quiet men without animosity or sadism.

Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.

Justice renders to every one his due.

On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break.

One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.

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.

He who profits by a crime commits it.

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.

Every instance of a man's suffering the penalty of the law is an instance of the failure of that penalty in effecting its purpose, which is to deter.

There is no peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war - at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.

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

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

Hanging was the worst use a man could be put to.

No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.