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.
Hanging was the worst use a man could be put to.
The torment of human frustration, whatever its immediate cause, is the knowledge that the self is in prison, its vital force and 'mangled mind' leaking away in lonely, wasteful self-conflict.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
Pardon is the virtue of victory.
Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.
If it's near dinner-time, the foreman takes out his watch when the jury has retired, and says: "Dear me, gentlemen, ten minutes to five, I declare! I dine at five, gentlemen." "So do I," says everybody else, except two men who ought to have dined at three and seem more than half disposed to stand out in consequence. The foreman smiles, and puts up his watch:--"Well, gentlemen, what do we say, plaintiff or defendant, gentlemen?
Faults of the head are punished in this world, those of the heart in another; but as most of our vices are compound, so also is their punishment.
Society has used the juvenile courts to create a caste system where there are throw-away people.
~James Bell
It is safer that a bad man should not be accused, than that he should be acquitted.
Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
Steal goods and you’ll go to prison, steal lands and you are a king.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.
The only effect of public punishment is to show the rabble how bravely it can be borne; and that every one who hath lost a toe-nail hath suffered worse.
Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.
If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.
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.
Do not lay on the multitude the blame that is due to a few.
A sick person is a prisoner.
The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.
A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.
I existed in a world that never is - the prison of the mind.
