Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?
In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
If it's near dinner-time, the foreman takes out his watch when the jury has retired, and says: "Dear me, gentlemen, ten minutes to five, I declare! I dine at five, gentlemen." "So do I," says everybody else, except two men who ought to have dined at three and seem more than half disposed to stand out in consequence. The foreman smiles, and puts up his watch:--"Well, gentlemen, what do we say, plaintiff or defendant, gentlemen?
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.
A sick person is a prisoner.
Man is condemned to be free.
The number of laws is constantly growing in all countries and, owing to this, what is called crime is very often not a crime at all, for it contains no element of violence or harm.
Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.
The only effect of public punishment is to show the rabble how bravely it can be borne; and that every one who hath lost a toe-nail hath suffered worse.
When is conduct a crime, and when is a crime not a crime? When Somebody Up There -- a monarch, a dictator, a Pope, a legislator -- so decrees.
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.
Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X came out of prison stronger.
In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.
They took away my money, my family, and my security. Why couldn't they destroy my ideas? We will question them in court tomorrow as we trigger The Revolution of all revolutions!
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.
No crime has been without a precedent.
There is no greater punishment of wickedness that that it is dissatisfied with itself and its deeds.
It is impossible to go through life without trust: That is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They keep returning to the same things.
Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.
History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.
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.
The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.
