Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.
In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.
Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future lives and crimes to society.
The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.
What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor.
We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business.
The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.
It is true you cannot eat freedom and you cannot power machinery with democracy. But then neither can political prisoners turn on the light in the cells of a dictatorship.
I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.
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.
If you share the crime of your friend, you make it your own.
A sick person is a prisoner.
Let us remember that justice must be observed even to the lowest.
There is a point at which even justice does injury.
I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky.
One crime has to be concealed by another.
We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.
A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.
I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up...I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through, before they could get to be as free as I was.
In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.
He who opens a school door, closes a prison.
Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.
Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.
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.
