The only difference between me and my fellow actors is that I've spent more time in jail.
He was a first-time nonviolent possible offender, ... And under the mandatory minimums, he was put in prison for 15 years. Not only does the punishment not fit the crime, but the mandatory minimums don't give judges any discretion to look at the background of the case, to read into the specifics of the case. I don't know a judge who really is in favor of the mandatory minimums.
Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.
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.
If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.
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.
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.
One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.
Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a God.
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.
A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards, as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.
A man who has no excuse for a crime, is indeed defenseless!
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.
Virtue pardons the wicked, as the sandal-tree perfumes the axe which strikes it.
It is certain that the study of human psychology, if it were undertaken exclusively in prisons, would also lead to misrepresentation and absurd generalizations.
The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.
No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.
Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.
By noiselessly going to a prison a civil-resister ensures a calm atmosphere.
In prison, you get the chance to see who really loves you.
Most people fancy themselves innocent of those crimes of which they cannot be convicted.
On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break.
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.
I existed in a world that never is - the prison of the mind.
