Quotes

Do not lay on the multitude the blame that is due to a few.

I can tell you this on a stack of Bibles: prisons are archaic, brutal, unregenerative, overcrowded hell holes where the inmates are treated like animals with absolutely not one humane thought given to what they are going to do once they are released. You're an animal in a cage and you're treated like one.

The difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion is the thickness of a prison walls.

They're not supposed to show prison films in prison. Especially ones that are about escaping.

Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our duty is to furnish it well.

It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.

No crime has been without a precedent.

Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.

Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrist? And what has he been after that they groan and shake their fists? And wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air? Oh they're taking him to prison for the colour of his hair.

There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.

We shall not yield to violence. We shall not be deprived of union freedoms. We shall never agree with sending people to prison for their convictions.

It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their own kind.

Extreme justice is extreme injustice.

Pardon is the virtue of victory.

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.

Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.

In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.

Crime succeeds by sudden despatch; honest counsels gain vigor by delay.

To be at peace in crime! Ah, who can thus flatter himself.

Virtue pardons the wicked, as the sandal-tree perfumes the axe which strikes it.

Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.

The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.

If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.

Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.

To trial bring her stolen charms, and let her prison be my arms.