What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor.
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.
One crime is everything; two nothing.
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 only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.
Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.
Prison makes you a better judge of character. You pick up on people much faster.
Most people fancy themselves innocent of those crimes of which they cannot be convicted.
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.
If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.
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.
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.”
On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break.
Experts and the educated elite have replaced what worked with what sounded good. Society was far more civilized before they took over our schools, prisons, welfare programs, police departments and courts. It's high time we ran these people out of our lives and went back to common sense.
Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future lives and crimes to society.
The best situation of all, and one frequently utilized, is for jails and prisons to allow volunteer ministers of all faiths to enter prisons and offer their services to the inmates who want them. That way, the religious needs of inmates are met but without government funds being spent.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.
In prison, you get the chance to see who really loves you.
It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.
I was put into jail as I was going to the shoemaker's to get a shoe which was mended. When I was let out the next morning, I proceeded to finish my errand, and, having put on my mended shoe, joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct; and in half an hour -- for the horse was soon tackled -- was in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off, and then the State was nowhere to be seen.
The world itself is but a large prison, out of which some are daily led to execution.
In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.
By noiselessly going to a prison a civil-resister ensures a calm atmosphere.
We who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments.
