Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.
It is certain that the study of human psychology, if it were undertaken exclusively in prisons, would also lead to misrepresentation and absurd generalizations.
Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our duty is to furnish it well.
History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.
The public have more interest in the punishment of an injury than he who receives it.
It is not at the table, but in prison, that you learn who your true friends are.
The severest justice may not always be the best policy.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?
If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.
The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.
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.
I am an expert of electricity. My father occupied the chair of applied electricity at the state prison.
There are dreadful punishments enacted against thieves; but it were much better to make such good provisions, by which every man might be put in a method how to live, and so to be preserved from the fatal necessity of stealing and dying for it.
He had drawn many a thousand of these rations in prisons and camps, and though he'd never had an opportunity to weight them on scales, and although, being a man of timid nature, he knew no way of standing up for his rights, he, like every other prisoner, had discovered long ago that honest weight was never to be found in the bread-cutting. There was short weight in every ration. The only point was how short. So every day you took a look to soothe your soul - today, maybe, they haven't snitched any.
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.
Society has used the juvenile courts to create a caste system where there are throw-away people.
~James Bell
While crime is punished it yet increases.
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.
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.
The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They keep returning to the same things.
