Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.
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.
Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.
Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a God.
I know not whether laws be right, or whether laws be wrong; All that we know who lie in gaol is that the wall is strong; And that each day is like a year, a year whose days are long.
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.
I just remember that disturbing feeling of walking into that prison, the complete loss of privacy, the complete loss of stimulation, dignity.
Well does Heaven have care that no man secures happiness by crime.
The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.
The only difference between me and my fellow actors is that I've spent more time in jail.
Forgiveness, that noblest of all self-denial, is a virtue which he alone who can practise in himself can willingly believe in another.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.
The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
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.
To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.
History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.
Hanging was the worst use a man could be put to.
I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.
Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.
I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.
Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.
I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice.
It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.
