He who profits by a crime commits it.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.
Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.
No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.
Care should be taken that the punishment does not exceed the guilt; and also that some men do not suffer for offenses for which others are not even indicted.
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.
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.
We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.
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.
I can work for the Lord in or out of prison.
The public have more interest in the punishment of an injury than he who receives it.
Any punishment that does not correct, that can merely rouse rebellion in whoever has to endure it, is a piece of gratuitous infamy which makes those who impose it more guilty in the eyes of humanity, good sense and reason, nay a hundred times more guilty than the victim on whom the punishment is inflicted.
Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?
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.
To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.
A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
We have our own system, ... and journalists in our system are not put in prison for embarrassing the government by revealing things the government might not wish to have revealed. The important thing is that our system, under which journalists can write without fear or favor, should continue.
It is certain that the study of human psychology, if it were undertaken exclusively in prisons, would also lead to misrepresentation and absurd generalizations.
I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.
I just remember that disturbing feeling of walking into that prison, the complete loss of privacy, the complete loss of stimulation, dignity.
