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.
Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.
It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.
The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.
I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky.
We're in a war. People who blast some pot on a casual basis are guilty of treason.
Body is a home, a prison and a grave.
There is a point at which even justice does injury.
On average, drug prisoners spend more time in federal prison than rapists, who often get out on early release because of the overcrowding in prison caused by the Drug War.
Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.
Prosecution I have managed to avoid; but I have been arrested, charged in a police court, have refused to be bound over, and thereupon have been unconditionally released - to my great regret; for I have always wanted to know what going to prison was like.
To seek the redress of grievances by going to law, is like sheep running for shelter to a bramble bush.
I have been studying how I may compare this prison where I live unto the world; Shut up in the prison of their own consciences.
Forgiveness, that noblest of all self-denial, is a virtue which he alone who can practise in himself can willingly believe in another.
It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.
No man should be judge in his own case.
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.
I was in prison, and you came unto me. Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.
~(Jesus Christ) Matthew 25:36, 40
In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
Concepts of justice must have hands and feet to carry out justice in every case in the shortest possible time and the lowest possible cost. That is the challenge to every lawyer and judge in America.
If you share the crime of your friend, you make it your own.
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.
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.
Law is merely the expression of the will of the strongest for the time being, and therefore laws have no fixity, but shift from generation to generation.
Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
