No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.
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.
Self is the only prison that can bind the soul.
Man is condemned to be free.
Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.
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.
I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.
The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.
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.
A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
Justice renders to every one his due.
So justice while she winks at crimes, Stumbles on innocence sometimes.
Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.
Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
The public have more interest in the punishment of an injury than he who receives it.
They're not supposed to show prison films in prison. Especially ones that are about escaping.
I am an expert of electricity. My father occupied the chair of applied electricity at the state prison.
One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.
We who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments.
The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.
No crime has been without a precedent.
