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.
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.
Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts.
I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.
We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business.
Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.
It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.
Whatever you think of de Sade, he was a complex figure and we should not look for easy answers with him. He was, strangely perhaps, against the death penalty, and he was never put in prison for murders or anything like that.
I have never been contained except I made the prison.
A variety in punishment is of utility, as well as a proportion.
Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrist? And what has he been after that they groan and shake their fists? And wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air? Oh they're taking him to prison for the colour of his hair.
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.
To seek the redress of grievances by going to law, is like sheep running for shelter to a bramble bush.
The difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion is the thickness of a prison walls.
Any punishment that does not correct, that can merely rouse rebellion in whoever has to endure it, is a piece of gratuitous infamy which makes those who impose it more guilty in the eyes of humanity, good sense and reason, nay a hundred times more guilty than the victim on whom the punishment is inflicted.
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.
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.
I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.
The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.
Crimes generally punish themselves.
I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.
There is a point at which even justice does injury.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
