Let us remember that justice must be observed even to the lowest.
Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a God.
I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky.
Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.
In prison, you get the chance to see who really loves you.
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.
No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.
Women now have choices. They can be married, not married, have a job, not have a job, be married with children, unmarried with children. Men have the same choice we've always had: work, or prison.
It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.
Faults of the head are punished in this world, those of the heart in another; but as most of our vices are compound, so also is their punishment.
I existed in a world that never is - the prison of the mind.
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.
Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
There are dreadful punishments enacted against thieves; but it were much better to make such good provisions, by which every man might be put in a method how to live, and so to be preserved from the fatal necessity of stealing and dying for it.
The perfection of a thing consists in its essence; there are perfect criminals, as there are men of perfect probity.
Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.
Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.
It is safer that a bad man should not be accused, than that he should be acquitted.
Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.
He who opens a school door, closes a prison.
If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.
Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.
When it comes to freedom, we are but prisoners of our own desires.
It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.
A country is in a bad state, which is governed only by laws; because a thousand things occur for which laws cannot provide, and where authority ought to interpose.
