Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.
Justice renders to every one his due.
While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.
Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.
He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it.
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.
The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.
The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.
To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.
Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.
The only effect of public punishment is to show the rabble how bravely it can be borne; and that every one who hath lost a toe-nail hath suffered worse.
I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.
We have initiated programs for re-entry offenders, since some 500,000 to 600,000 offenders will come out of prison each year for the next three or four years. We want to have positive alternatives when they come back to the community.
A sick person is a prisoner.
Written laws are like spiders' webs, and will, like them, only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful will easily break through them.
No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.
Crime is a logical extension of the sort of behavior that often [is] considered perfectly respectable in legitimate business.
I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.
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.
They're not supposed to show prison films in prison. Especially ones that are about escaping.
The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.
It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.
We shall not yield to violence. We shall not be deprived of union freedoms. We shall never agree with sending people to prison for their convictions.
Pardon is the virtue of victory.
