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.
Steal goods and you’ll go to prison, steal lands and you are a king.
While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.
What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.
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.
Wherever any one is against his will, that is to him a prison.
It is safer that a bad man should not be accused, than that he should be acquitted.
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.
I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up...I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through, before they could get to be as free as I was.
On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break.
The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.
A sick person is a prisoner.
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?
Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a God.
By noiselessly going to a prison a civil-resister ensures a calm atmosphere.
One man meets an infamous punishment for that crime which confers a diadem upon another.
The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.
In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
One crime has to be concealed by another.
The mellow sweetness of pumpkin pie off a prison spoon is something you will never forget.
The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
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.
Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.
Fear can be like a prison. It is, however, a self made prison. Many are imprisoned by fear. No one else can liberate them from this prison. Others may inspire them but they must liberate themselves.
Extreme justice is extreme injustice.
