Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
It was only when I lay there on the rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not between states nor between social classes nor between political parties, but right through every human heart, through all human hearts. And that is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me, bless you, prison, for having been a part of my life.
So justice while she winks at crimes, Stumbles on innocence sometimes.
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.
I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.
Man is condemned to be free.
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.
Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.
If you share the crime of your friend, you make it your own.
We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business.
Three hundred years ago a prisoner condemned to the Tower of London carved on the wall of his cell this sentiment to keep up his spirits during his long imprisonment: “It is not adversity that kills, but the impatience with which we bear adversity.”
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.
Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them.
In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.
We're in a war. People who blast some pot on a casual basis are guilty of treason.
Vices are not crimes.
To trial bring her stolen charms, and let her prison be my arms.
Every instance of a man's suffering the penalty of the law is an instance of the failure of that penalty in effecting its purpose, which is to deter.
Reality becomes a prison to those who can’t get out of it.
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.
The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They keep returning to the same things.
Extreme justice is extreme injustice.
One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.
To be at peace in crime! Ah, who can thus flatter himself.
