When is conduct a crime, and when is a crime not a crime? When Somebody Up There -- a monarch, a dictator, a Pope, a legislator -- so decrees.
If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.
Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.
To seek the redress of grievances by going to law, is like sheep running for shelter to a bramble bush.
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.
There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.
The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.
You utter a vow, or forge a signature, and you may find yourself bound for life to a monastery, a woman, or prison.
He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it.
Money will determine whether the accused goes to prison or walks out of the courtroom a free man.
A sick person is a prisoner.
One crime is everything; two nothing.
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.
Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.
To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.
Prosecution I have managed to avoid; but I have been arrested, charged in a police court, have refused to be bound over, and thereupon have been unconditionally released - to my great regret; for I have always wanted to know what going to prison was like.
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.
Show me the prison, Show me the jail, Show me the prisoner whose life has gone stale. And I'll show you a young man with so many reasons why And there, but for fortune, go you or I.
Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.
Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?
Taught from infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.
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.
I can tell you this on a stack of Bibles: prisons are archaic, brutal, unregenerative, overcrowded hell holes where the inmates are treated like animals with absolutely not one humane thought given to what they are going to do once they are released. You're an animal in a cage and you're treated like one.
The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.
Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them.
