Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.
To be at peace in crime! Ah, who can thus flatter himself.
The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.
It is hard, but it is excellent, to find the right knowledge of when correction is necessary and when grace doth most avail.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.
The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.
We shall fight against them, throw them in prisons and destroy them.
No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, that can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.
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 only difference between me and my fellow actors is that I've spent more time in jail.
Pardon is the virtue of victory.
Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.
The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.
The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.
And while God had work for Paul, he found him friends both in court and prison. Let persecutors send saints to prison, God can provide a keeper for their turn.
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.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.
Wherever any one is against his will, that is to him a prison.
I just remember that disturbing feeling of walking into that prison, the complete loss of privacy, the complete loss of stimulation, dignity.
The contagion of crime is like that of the plague. Criminals collected together corrupt each other; they are worse than ever when at the termination of their punishment they re-enter 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.
Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.
I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.
Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.
