Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.
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.
Reality becomes a prison to those who can’t get out of it.
The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.
Body is a home, a prison and a grave.
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.
It is hard, but it is excellent, to find the right knowledge of when correction is necessary and when grace doth most avail.
If you share the crime of your friend, you make it your own.
Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X came out of prison stronger.
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.
It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.
A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.
Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.
I have never been contained except I made the prison.
The public have more interest in the punishment of an injury than he who receives it.
If you want total security, go to prison. There you’re fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking…is freedom.
The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.
Every crime has, in the moment of its perpetration, Its own avenging angel--dark misgiving, An ominous sinking at the inmost heart.
One crime has to be concealed by another.
The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.
As we grow in wisdom, we pardon more freely.
Forgiveness, that noblest of all self-denial, is a virtue which he alone who can practise in himself can willingly believe in another.
I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.
Since 1957, black people have experienced double-digit unemployment - in good times and bad times. Look at the population of African Americans in prison. They represent more than half the population of prisoners in the country, 55 percent of those on death row.
