Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.
Fast closed with double grills And triple gates–the cell To wicked souls is hell; But to a mind that's innocent 'Tis only iron, wood and stone.
There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.
The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
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.
Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.
A country is in a bad state, which is governed only by laws; because a thousand things occur for which laws cannot provide, and where authority ought to interpose.
Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.
A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.
There is a point at which even justice does injury.
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.
Wherever any one is against his will, that is to him a prison.
Body is a home, a prison and a grave.
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.
When is conduct a crime, and when is a crime not a crime? When Somebody Up There -- a monarch, a dictator, a Pope, a legislator -- so decrees.
The world itself is but a large prison, out of which some are daily led to execution.
The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.
In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.
We have our own system, ... and journalists in our system are not put in prison for embarrassing the government by revealing things the government might not wish to have revealed. The important thing is that our system, under which journalists can write without fear or favor, should continue.
I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up...I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through, before they could get to be as free as I was.
It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.
It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.
Society has used the juvenile courts to create a caste system where there are throw-away people.
~James Bell
