How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.
Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.
We're in a war. People who blast some pot on a casual basis are guilty of treason.
Whatever you think of de Sade, he was a complex figure and we should not look for easy answers with him. He was, strangely perhaps, against the death penalty, and he was never put in prison for murders or anything like that.
Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.
The torment of human frustration, whatever its immediate cause, is the knowledge that the self is in prison, its vital force and 'mangled mind' leaking away in lonely, wasteful self-conflict.
To try to raise a son from inside the prison walls is a very difficult thing. But I want to say to the world my son at 16 was the one who tried the most to get me out of prison.
~Jim Bakker
I have been studying how I may compare this prison where I live unto the world; Shut up in the prison of their own consciences.
We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.
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.
One crime is everything; two nothing.
A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards, as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.
Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.
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.
It was only when I lay there on the rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not between states nor between social classes nor between political parties, but right through every human heart, through all human hearts. And that is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me, bless you, prison, for having been a part of my life.
Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.
The world itself is but a large prison, out of which some are daily led to execution.
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.
Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.
The mellow sweetness of pumpkin pie off a prison spoon is something you will never forget.
