Quotes

Society has used the juvenile courts to create a caste system where there are throw-away people.

The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.

Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.

Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.

Before we can diminish our sufferings from the ill-controlled aggressive assaults of fellow citizens, we must renounce the philosophy of punishment, the obsolete, vengeful penal attitude. In its place we would seek a comprehensive, constructive social attitude - therapeutic in some instances, restraining in some instances, but preventive in its total social impact. In the last analysis this becomes a question of personal morals and values. No matter how glorified or how piously disguised, vengeance as a human motive must be personally repudiated by each and every one of us.

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.

I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.

The solution to our drug problem is not in incarceration.

There are few better measures of the concern a society has for its individual members and its own well being than the way it handles criminals.

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.

Some laws of state aimed at curbing crime are even more criminal.

The severest justice may not always be the best policy.

In jail a man has no personality. He is a minor disposal problem and a few entries on reports. Nobody cares who loves or hates him, what he looks like, what he did with his life. Nobody reacts to him unless he gives trouble. Nobody abuses him. All that is asked of him is that he go quietly to the right cell and remain quiet when he gets there. There is nothing to fight against, nothing to be mad at. The jailers are quiet men without animosity or sadism.

I was put into jail as I was going to the shoemaker's to get a shoe which was mended. When I was let out the next morning, I proceeded to finish my errand, and, having put on my mended shoe, joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct; and in half an hour -- for the horse was soon tackled -- was in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off, and then the State was nowhere to be seen.

The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.

The only difference between me and my fellow actors is that I've spent more time in jail.

It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.

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

Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.

He who profits by a crime commits it.

Trial by jury itself, instead of being a security to persons who are accused, shall be a delusion, a mockery, and a snare.

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.

One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.

There are dreadful punishments enacted against thieves; but it were much better to make such good provisions, by which every man might be put in a method how to live, and so to be preserved from the fatal necessity of stealing and dying for it.

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