No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.
It was only when I lay there on the rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not between states nor between social classes nor between political parties, but right through every human heart, through all human hearts. And that is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me, bless you, prison, for having been a part of my life.
A variety in punishment is of utility, as well as a proportion.
Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.
Three hundred years ago a prisoner condemned to the Tower of London carved on the wall of his cell this sentiment to keep up his spirits during his long imprisonment: “It is not adversity that kills, but the impatience with which we bear adversity.”
Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
One crime has to be concealed by another.
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.
The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.
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 sometimes wish that people would put a little more emphasis upon the observance of the law than they do upon its enforcement.
I never told a victim story about my imprisonment. Instead, I told a transformation story - about how prison changed my outlook, about how I saw that communication, truth, and trust are at the heart of power.
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.
The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.
Extreme justice is extreme injustice.
The mellow sweetness of pumpkin pie off a prison spoon is something you will never forget.
Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.
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 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.
Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X came out of prison stronger.
Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.
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 don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.
The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business.
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.
