I sometimes wish that people would put a little more emphasis upon the observance of the law than they do upon its enforcement.
Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts.
It is certain that the study of human psychology, if it were undertaken exclusively in prisons, would also lead to misrepresentation and absurd generalizations.
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.
Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.
Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.
The world itself is but a large prison, out of which some are daily led to execution.
Federal prison, if you get any of it, you're going to have to do 85% of it. And the reason why I called it that is because I had a friend who got sent to the federal joint and his whole... it wasn't about him being in jail. He cried about the 85%.
Man is condemned to be free.
It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.
It is safer that a bad man should not be accused, than that he should be acquitted.
The public have more interest in the punishment of an injury than he who receives it.
A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
If two people fight on the street, whose fault is it? Who is the criminal? It is the government’s responsibility because the government has not educated the people to not make mistakes. The people have inadequate, incompetent education, so they make mistakes! It is such a fraud.
Adversities such as being homeless and going to prison has made many people stronger.
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.
Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.
A man who has no excuse for a crime, is indeed defenseless!
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.
They're not supposed to show prison films in prison. Especially ones that are about escaping.
No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.
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.
