The only difference between me and my fellow actors is that I've spent more time in jail.
Since 1957, black people have experienced double-digit unemployment - in good times and bad times. Look at the population of African Americans in prison. They represent more than half the population of prisoners in the country, 55 percent of those on death row.
If you share the crime of your friend, you make it your own.
The torment of human frustration, whatever its immediate cause, is the knowledge that the self is in prison, its vital force and 'mangled mind' leaking away in lonely, wasteful self-conflict.
It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.
I can work for the Lord in or out of prison.
One crime is everything; two nothing.
If it's near dinner-time, the foreman takes out his watch when the jury has retired, and says: "Dear me, gentlemen, ten minutes to five, I declare! I dine at five, gentlemen." "So do I," says everybody else, except two men who ought to have dined at three and seem more than half disposed to stand out in consequence. The foreman smiles, and puts up his watch:--"Well, gentlemen, what do we say, plaintiff or defendant, gentlemen?
Justice renders to every one his due.
No man should be judge in his own case.
To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.
Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.
Vices are not crimes.
I have never been contained except I made the prison.
If you treat prisoners well, they will be less angry, less inclined to violence inside prison, less likely to provoke violent actions by guards, less likely to have reason to file brutality lawsuits that cost taxpayers a bundle and waste administrators' time. And most important, well-treated prisoners will be less likely to leave prison angrier, more vicious and more inclined to criminal behavior than when they went in.
You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.
One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.
Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.
And while God had work for Paul, he found him friends both in court and prison. Let persecutors send saints to prison, God can provide a keeper for their turn.
Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.
Whatever is worthy to be loved for anything is worthy of preservation. A wise and dispassionate legislator, if any such should ever arise among men, will not condemn to death him who has done or is likely to do more service than injury to society. Blocks and gibbets are the nearest objects with legislators, and their business is never with hopes or with virtues.
Crimes generally punish themselves.
In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.
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.
