It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.
Here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to be to restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work.
Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.
On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break.
One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.
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.
Nor stony tower, nor walls of beaten brass, Nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron, Can be retentive to the strength of spirit; But life, being weary of these worldly bars, Never lacks power to dismiss itself.
No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.
Hanging was the worst use a man could be put to.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
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.
You utter a vow, or forge a signature, and you may find yourself bound for life to a monastery, a woman, or prison.
The mellow sweetness of pumpkin pie off a prison spoon is something you will never forget.
The public have more interest in the punishment of an injury than he who receives it.
Show me the prison, Show me the jail, Show me the prisoner whose life has gone stale. And I'll show you a young man with so many reasons why And there, but for fortune, go you or I.
Forgiveness, that noblest of all self-denial, is a virtue which he alone who can practise in himself can willingly believe in another.
The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.
What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.
One man meets an infamous punishment for that crime which confers a diadem upon another.
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.
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.
The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.
Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?
