The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.
The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.
A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.
It is impossible to go through life without trust: That is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.
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?
Let us remember that justice must be observed even to the lowest.
To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.
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.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They keep returning to the same things.
Here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to be to restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work.
I never told a victim story about my imprisonment. Instead, I told a transformation story - about how prison changed my outlook, about how I saw that communication, truth, and trust are at the heart of power.
If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.
Every crime has, in the moment of its perpetration, Its own avenging angel--dark misgiving, An ominous sinking at the inmost heart.
America is the land of the second chance – and when the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life.
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.
The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.
It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.
We are prisoners of ideas.
It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.
Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.
In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.
On average, drug prisoners spend more time in federal prison than rapists, who often get out on early release because of the overcrowding in prison caused by the Drug War.
There is no greater punishment of wickedness that that it is dissatisfied with itself and its deeds.
