When you are younger you get blamed for crimes you never committed and when you're older you begin to get credit for virtues you never possessed. It evens itself out.
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.
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.
Pardon is the virtue of victory.
Care should be taken that the punishment does not exceed the guilt; and also that some men do not suffer for offenses for which others are not even indicted.
It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.
I existed in a world that never is - the prison of the mind.
Most people fancy themselves innocent of those crimes of which they cannot be convicted.
The number of laws is constantly growing in all countries and, owing to this, what is called crime is very often not a crime at all, for it contains no element of violence or harm.
History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.
I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice.
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.
While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.
The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.
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.
Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.
He was a first-time nonviolent possible offender, ... And under the mandatory minimums, he was put in prison for 15 years. Not only does the punishment not fit the crime, but the mandatory minimums don't give judges any discretion to look at the background of the case, to read into the specifics of the case. I don't know a judge who really is in favor of the mandatory minimums.
I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky.
I can work for the Lord in or out of prison.
You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.
One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.
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.
One crime is everything; two nothing.
Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.
