Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.
Experts and the educated elite have replaced what worked with what sounded good. Society was far more civilized before they took over our schools, prisons, welfare programs, police departments and courts. It's high time we ran these people out of our lives and went back to common sense.
The only difference between me and my fellow actors is that I've spent more time in jail.
The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.
A man who has no excuse for a crime, is indeed defenseless!
Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached.
The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.
Extreme justice is extreme injustice.
To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.
Federal prison, if you get any of it, you're going to have to do 85% of it. And the reason why I called it that is because I had a friend who got sent to the federal joint and his whole... it wasn't about him being in jail. He cried about the 85%.
Nor stony tower, nor walls of beaten brass, Nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron, Can be retentive to the strength of spirit; But life, being weary of these worldly bars, Never lacks power to dismiss itself.
Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.
Pardon is the virtue of victory.
As we grow in wisdom, we pardon more freely.
The uneven impact of actual enforcement measures tends to mirror and reinforce more general patterns of discrimination (along socioeconomic, racial and ethnic, sexual, and perhaps generational lines) within the society. As a consequence, such enforcement (ineffective as it may be in producing conformity) almost certainly reinforces feelings of alienation already prevalent within major segments of the population.
I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.
I have been studying how I may compare This prison where I live unto the world; And, for because the world is populous, And here is not a creature but myself, I cannot do it. Yet I'll hammer it out.
One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.
It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
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.
I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up...I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through, before they could get to be as free as I was.
Wherever any one is against his will, that is to him a prison.
The world itself is but a large prison, out of which some are daily led to execution.
In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.
