If you want total security, go to prison. There you’re fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking…is freedom.
One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.
The perfection of a thing consists in its essence; there are perfect criminals, as there are men of perfect probity.
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.
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.
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.
Faults of the head are punished in this world, those of the heart in another; but as most of our vices are compound, so also is their punishment.
Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.
I know not whether laws be right, or whether laws be wrong; All that we know who lie in gaol is that the wall is strong; And that each day is like a year, a year whose days are long.
Prison makes you a better judge of character. You pick up on people much faster.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.
It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.
No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, that can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.
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.
We who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments.
I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.
Trial by jury itself, instead of being a security to persons who are accused, shall be a delusion, a mockery, and a snare.
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.
There is no greater punishment of wickedness that that it is dissatisfied with itself and its deeds.
Do not lay on the multitude the blame that is due to a few.
Show me the prison, Show me the jail, Show me the prisoner whose life has gone stale. And I'll show you a young man with so many reasons why And there, but for fortune, go you or I.
The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.
What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor.
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
