When the Nazis came for the communists, I remained silent; I was not a communist. When they locked up the social democrats, I remained silent; I was not a social democrat. When they came for the trade unionists, I did not speak out; I was not a trade unionist. When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out.
He who opens a school door, closes a prison.
Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.
No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
The public have more interest in the punishment of an injury than he who receives it.
Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts.
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.
The difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion is the thickness of a prison walls.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
We have initiated programs for re-entry offenders, since some 500,000 to 600,000 offenders will come out of prison each year for the next three or four years. We want to have positive alternatives when they come back to the community.
It is not at the table, but in prison, that you learn who your true friends are.
Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilization.
Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.
The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.
Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.
Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.
Every instance of a man's suffering the penalty of the law is an instance of the failure of that penalty in effecting its purpose, which is to deter.
Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.
The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.
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.
Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them.
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.
It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.
