If you want total security, go to prison. There you’re fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking…is freedom.
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.
Self is the only prison that can bind the soul.
America is the land of the second chance – and when the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life.
One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.
One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.
Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage 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.
Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.
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.
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.
Crime is a logical extension of the sort of behavior that often [is] considered perfectly respectable in legitimate business.
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.
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.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.
Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.
I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.
The mellow sweetness of pumpkin pie off a prison spoon is something you will never forget.
It is safer that a bad man should not be accused, than that he should be acquitted.
In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
If we look at Houston, which is a very environmentally toxic place, we find that it has one of the highest levels of young men going to prison and also among the highest levels of illiteracy in the country.
The world itself is but a large prison, out of which some are daily led to execution.
Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.
Pardon is the virtue of victory.
