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.
A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
One man meets an infamous punishment for that crime which confers a diadem upon another.
What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor.
We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.
There are few better measures of the concern a society has for its individual members and its own well being than the way it handles criminals.
Vices are not crimes.
In prison, you get the chance to see who really loves you.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
Society has used the juvenile courts to create a caste system where there are throw-away people.
~James Bell
It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.
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.
One of the problems that the marijuana reform movement consistently faces is that everyone wants to talk about what marijuana does, but no one ever wants to look at what marijuana prohibition does. Marijuana never kicks down your door in the middle of the night. Marijuana never locks up sick and dying people, does not suppress medical research, does not peek in bedroom windows.
Do not lay on the multitude the blame that is due to a few.
Any punishment that does not correct, that can merely rouse rebellion in whoever has to endure it, is a piece of gratuitous infamy which makes those who impose it more guilty in the eyes of humanity, good sense and reason, nay a hundred times more guilty than the victim on whom the punishment is inflicted.
We are prisoners of ideas.
The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.
It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.
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.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.
To seek the redress of grievances by going to law, is like sheep running for shelter to a bramble bush.
I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
