They were being driven to a prison, through no fault of their own, in all probability for life. In comparison, how much easier it would be to walk to the gallows than to this tomb of living horrors!
Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.
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.
Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
Adversities such as being homeless and going to prison has made many people stronger.
Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our duty is to furnish it well.
If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.
Experts and the educated elite have replaced what worked with what sounded good. Society was far more civilized before they took over our schools, prisons, welfare programs, police departments and courts. It's high time we ran these people out of our lives and went back to common sense.
Here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to be to restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work.
He had drawn many a thousand of these rations in prisons and camps, and though he'd never had an opportunity to weight them on scales, and although, being a man of timid nature, he knew no way of standing up for his rights, he, like every other prisoner, had discovered long ago that honest weight was never to be found in the bread-cutting. There was short weight in every ration. The only point was how short. So every day you took a look to soothe your soul - today, maybe, they haven't snitched any.
Self is the only prison that can bind the soul.
Since 1957, black people have experienced double-digit unemployment - in good times and bad times. Look at the population of African Americans in prison. They represent more than half the population of prisoners in the country, 55 percent of those on death row.
Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.
Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?
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.
Every instance of a man's suffering the penalty of the law is an instance of the failure of that penalty in effecting its purpose, which is to deter.
One man meets an infamous punishment for that crime which confers a diadem upon another.
The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.
I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.
Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.
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.
What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.
The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.
History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.
Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.
