Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.
The mellow sweetness of pumpkin pie off a prison spoon is something you will never forget.
There is a point at which even justice does injury.
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.
Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
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 sick person is a prisoner.
Organized crime in America takes in over forty billion dollars a year. This is quite a profitable sum, especially when one considers that the Mafia spends very little for office supplies.
If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.
A man who has no excuse for a crime, is indeed defenseless!
Show me the prison, Show me the jail, Show me the prisoner whose life has gone stale. And I'll show you a young man with so many reasons why And there, but for fortune, go you or I.
The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.
The severest justice may not always be the best policy.
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.
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.
It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.
Three hundred years ago a prisoner condemned to the Tower of London carved on the wall of his cell this sentiment to keep up his spirits during his long imprisonment: “It is not adversity that kills, but the impatience with which we bear adversity.”
The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.
Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.
The world itself is but a large prison, out of which some are daily led to execution.
We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.
The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
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 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?
