We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business.
Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.
It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their own kind.
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.
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.
In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.
To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.
I have been studying how I may compare this prison where I live unto the world; Shut up in the prison of their own consciences.
Taught from infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.
Three hundred years ago a prisoner condemned to the Tower of London carved on the wall of his cell this sentiment to keep up his spirits during his long imprisonment: “It is not adversity that kills, but the impatience with which we bear adversity.”
In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.
Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.
By noiselessly going to a prison a civil-resister ensures a calm atmosphere.
No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky.
The mellow sweetness of pumpkin pie off a prison spoon is something you will never forget.
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?
A man who has no excuse for a crime, is indeed defenseless!
A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts.
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.
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.
It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.
