Wherever any one is against his will, that is to him a prison.
Vices are not crimes.
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.
The world itself is but a large prison, out of which some are daily led to execution.
You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.
I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.
Most people fancy themselves innocent of those crimes of which they cannot be convicted.
The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.
In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.
Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.
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.
One crime is everything; two nothing.
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.
What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor.
It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.
In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.
I never told a victim story about my imprisonment. Instead, I told a transformation story - about how prison changed my outlook, about how I saw that communication, truth, and trust are at the heart of power.
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.
Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.
A country is in a bad state, which is governed only by laws; because a thousand things occur for which laws cannot provide, and where authority ought to interpose.
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.
Extreme justice is extreme injustice.
America is the land of the second chance – and when the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life.
