Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.
Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.
You utter a vow, or forge a signature, and you may find yourself bound for life to a monastery, a woman, or prison.
Most people fancy themselves innocent of those crimes of which they cannot be convicted.
When it comes to freedom, we are but prisoners of our own desires.
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.
I am an expert of electricity. My father occupied the chair of applied electricity at the state prison.
A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.
In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.
He who profits by a crime commits it.
Written laws are like spiders' webs, and will, like them, only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful will easily break through them.
Man is condemned to be free.
No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.
I was in prison, and you came unto me. Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.
~(Jesus Christ) Matthew 25:36, 40
No man survives when freedom fails. The best men rot in filthy jails, and those who cry 'appease, appease' are hanged by those they tried to please.
The severest justice may not always be the best policy.
They're not supposed to show prison films in prison. Especially ones that are about escaping.
It is true you cannot eat freedom and you cannot power machinery with democracy. But then neither can political prisoners turn on the light in the cells of a dictatorship.
The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business.
We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
A sick person is a prisoner.
I was put into jail as I was going to the shoemaker's to get a shoe which was mended. When I was let out the next morning, I proceeded to finish my errand, and, having put on my mended shoe, joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct; and in half an hour -- for the horse was soon tackled -- was in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off, and then the State was nowhere to be seen.
