I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky.
As we grow in wisdom, we pardon more freely.
Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.
If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.
It is true you cannot eat freedom and you cannot power machinery with democracy. But then neither can political prisoners turn on the light in the cells of a dictatorship.
If you treat prisoners well, they will be less angry, less inclined to violence inside prison, less likely to provoke violent actions by guards, less likely to have reason to file brutality lawsuits that cost taxpayers a bundle and waste administrators' time. And most important, well-treated prisoners will be less likely to leave prison angrier, more vicious and more inclined to criminal behavior than when they went in.
The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.
Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.
A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.
So justice while she winks at crimes, Stumbles on innocence sometimes.
I existed in a world that never is - the prison of the mind.
Law is merely the expression of the will of the strongest for the time being, and therefore laws have no fixity, but shift from generation to generation.
The uneven impact of actual enforcement measures tends to mirror and reinforce more general patterns of discrimination (along socioeconomic, racial and ethnic, sexual, and perhaps generational lines) within the society. As a consequence, such enforcement (ineffective as it may be in producing conformity) almost certainly reinforces feelings of alienation already prevalent within major segments of the population.
Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.
Pardon is the virtue of victory.
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.
The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.
I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.
To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.
It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.
There are few better measures of the concern a society has for its individual members and its own well being than the way it handles criminals.
There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.
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.
Steal goods and you’ll go to prison, steal lands and you are a king.
In my country we go to prison first and then become President.
