The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
Trial by jury itself, instead of being a security to persons who are accused, shall be a delusion, a mockery, and a snare.
What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.
On average, drug prisoners spend more time in federal prison than rapists, who often get out on early release because of the overcrowding in prison caused by the Drug War.
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.
The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.
History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.
It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.
Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.
We're in a war. People who blast some pot on a casual basis are guilty of treason.
Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.
When it comes to freedom, we are but prisoners of our own desires.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.
Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X came out of prison stronger.
Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.
I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky.
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.
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.
There are dreadful punishments enacted against thieves; but it were much better to make such good provisions, by which every man might be put in a method how to live, and so to be preserved from the fatal necessity of stealing and dying for it.
Body is a home, a prison and a grave.
Justice renders to every one his due.
No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.
