Quotes

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.

Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.

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.

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.

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

The perfection of a thing consists in its essence; there are perfect criminals, as there are men of perfect probity.

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.

You utter a vow, or forge a signature, and you may find yourself bound for life to a monastery, a woman, or prison.

While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.

It is safer that a bad man should not be accused, than that he should be acquitted.

Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.

Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.

Law is merely the expression of the will of the strongest for the time being, and therefore laws have no fixity, but shift from generation to generation.

The public have more interest in the punishment of an injury than he who receives it.

Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.

How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.

In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.

Crime is a logical extension of the sort of behavior that often [is] considered perfectly respectable in legitimate business.

The best situation of all, and one frequently utilized, is for jails and prisons to allow volunteer ministers of all faiths to enter prisons and offer their services to the inmates who want them. That way, the religious needs of inmates are met but without government funds being spent.

Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.

The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.

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.

The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.

When you are younger you get blamed for crimes you never committed and when you're older you begin to get credit for virtues you never possessed. It evens itself out.