One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.
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.
Wicked deeds are generally done, even with impunity, for the mere desire of occupation.
If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.
It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.
Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards, as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.
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.
How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.
The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
So justice while she winks at crimes, Stumbles on innocence sometimes.
They took away my money, my family, and my security. Why couldn't they destroy my ideas? We will question them in court tomorrow as we trigger The Revolution of all revolutions!
Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.
Extreme justice is extreme injustice.
I just remember that disturbing feeling of walking into that prison, the complete loss of privacy, the complete loss of stimulation, dignity.
No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.
Well does Heaven have care that no man secures happiness by crime.
Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.
It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
Every crime has, in the moment of its perpetration, Its own avenging angel--dark misgiving, An ominous sinking at the inmost heart.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, that can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.
When it comes to freedom, we are but prisoners of our own desires.
Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.
