The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.
They're not supposed to show prison films in prison. Especially ones that are about escaping.
Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.
Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them.
It is not at the table, but in prison, that you learn who your true friends are.
I sometimes wish that people would put a little more emphasis upon the observance of the law than they do upon its enforcement.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
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.
Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.
It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their own kind.
When it comes to freedom, we are but prisoners of our own desires.
In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.
If it's near dinner-time, the foreman takes out his watch when the jury has retired, and says: "Dear me, gentlemen, ten minutes to five, I declare! I dine at five, gentlemen." "So do I," says everybody else, except two men who ought to have dined at three and seem more than half disposed to stand out in consequence. The foreman smiles, and puts up his watch:--"Well, gentlemen, what do we say, plaintiff or defendant, gentlemen?
He who opens a school door, closes a prison.
I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.
One crime is everything; two nothing.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.
I have never been contained except I made the prison.
The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.
Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached.
No man survives when freedom fails. The best men rot in filthy jails, and those who cry 'appease, appease' are hanged by those they tried to please.
In jail a man has no personality. He is a minor disposal problem and a few entries on reports. Nobody cares who loves or hates him, what he looks like, what he did with his life. Nobody reacts to him unless he gives trouble. Nobody abuses him. All that is asked of him is that he go quietly to the right cell and remain quiet when he gets there. There is nothing to fight against, nothing to be mad at. The jailers are quiet men without animosity or sadism.
