Society has used the juvenile courts to create a caste system where there are throw-away people.
~James Bell
Some laws of state aimed at curbing crime are even more criminal.
The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.
Most people fancy themselves innocent of those crimes of which they cannot be convicted.
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.
The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
Written laws are like spiders' webs, and will, like them, only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful will easily break through them.
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.
The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They keep returning to the same things.
While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.
Self is the only prison that can bind the soul.
To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.
Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.
Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
I existed in a world that never is - the prison of the mind.
I can work for the Lord in or out of prison.
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.
Prison makes you a better judge of character. You pick up on people much faster.
Trial by jury itself, instead of being a security to persons who are accused, shall be a delusion, a mockery, and a snare.
Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.
Whatever is worthy to be loved for anything is worthy of preservation. A wise and dispassionate legislator, if any such should ever arise among men, will not condemn to death him who has done or is likely to do more service than injury to society. Blocks and gibbets are the nearest objects with legislators, and their business is never with hopes or with virtues.
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.
There is no peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war - at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.
If you share the crime of your friend, you make it your own.
One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.
