One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.
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.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
He who profits by a crime commits it.
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.
No man should be judge in his own case.
The only difference between me and my fellow actors is that I've spent more time in jail.
Governments have tried to stop crime through punishment throughout the ages, but crime continued in the past punishment remains. Crime can only be stopped through a preventive approach in the schools. You teach the students Transcendental Meditation, and right away they’ll begin using their full brain physiology sensible and they will not get sidetracked into wrong things.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.
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.
Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.
Wherever any one is against his will, that is to him a prison.
In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.
If two people fight on the street, whose fault is it? Who is the criminal? It is the government’s responsibility because the government has not educated the people to not make mistakes. The people have inadequate, incompetent education, so they make mistakes! It is such a fraud.
In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
It was only when I lay there on the rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not between states nor between social classes nor between political parties, but right through every human heart, through all human hearts. And that is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me, bless you, prison, for having been a part of my life.
Faults of the head are punished in this world, those of the heart in another; but as most of our vices are compound, so also is their punishment.
The severest justice may not always be the best policy.
You utter a vow, or forge a signature, and you may find yourself bound for life to a monastery, a woman, or prison.
To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.
Do not lay on the multitude the blame that is due to a few.
What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor.
If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.
I know not whether laws be right, or whether laws be wrong; All that we know who lie in gaol is that the wall is strong; And that each day is like a year, a year whose days are long.
