When it comes to freedom, we are but prisoners of our own desires.
Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.
Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X came out of prison stronger.
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.
The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.
Whatever you think of de Sade, he was a complex figure and we should not look for easy answers with him. He was, strangely perhaps, against the death penalty, and he was never put in prison for murders or anything like that.
A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.
In jail a man has no personality. He is a minor disposal problem and a few entries on reports. Nobody cares who loves or hates him, what he looks like, what he did with his life. Nobody reacts to him unless he gives trouble. Nobody abuses him. All that is asked of him is that he go quietly to the right cell and remain quiet when he gets there. There is nothing to fight against, nothing to be mad at. The jailers are quiet men without animosity or sadism.
There are few better measures of the concern a society has for its individual members and its own well being than the way it handles criminals.
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.
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.
In prison, you get the chance to see who really loves you.
Pardon is the virtue of victory.
I existed in a world that never is - the prison of the mind.
It is certain that the study of human psychology, if it were undertaken exclusively in prisons, would also lead to misrepresentation and absurd generalizations.
It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.
The difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion is the thickness of a prison walls.
It was only when I lay there on the rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not between states nor between social classes nor between political parties, but right through every human heart, through all human hearts. And that is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me, bless you, prison, for having been a part of my life.
Reality becomes a prison to those who can’t get out of it.
Self is the only prison that can bind the soul.
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 degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
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.
