Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
I can tell you this on a stack of Bibles: prisons are archaic, brutal, unregenerative, overcrowded hell holes where the inmates are treated like animals with absolutely not one humane thought given to what they are going to do once they are released. You're an animal in a cage and you're treated like one.
Self is the only prison that can bind the soul.
Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X came out of prison stronger.
Whatever is worthy to be loved for anything is worthy of preservation. A wise and dispassionate legislator, if any such should ever arise among men, will not condemn to death him who has done or is likely to do more service than injury to society. Blocks and gibbets are the nearest objects with legislators, and their business is never with hopes or with virtues.
No crime has been without a precedent.
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.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.
Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a God.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.
The public have more interest in the punishment of an injury than he who receives it.
To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.
The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.
Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.
They're not supposed to show prison films in prison. Especially ones that are about escaping.
Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.
Concepts of justice must have hands and feet to carry out justice in every case in the shortest possible time and the lowest possible cost. That is the challenge to every lawyer and judge in America.
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.
To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.
The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They keep returning to the same things.
The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.
Reality becomes a prison to those who can’t get out of it.
Women have worked hard; starved in prison; given of their time and lives that we might sit in the House of Commons and take part in the legislating of this country.
