Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.
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.
To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.
Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.
The world itself is but a large prison, out of which some are daily led to execution.
To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.
Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.
It is impossible to go through life without trust: That is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.
Faults of the head are punished in this world, those of the heart in another; but as most of our vices are compound, so also is their punishment.
One man meets an infamous punishment for that crime which confers a diadem upon another.
One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.
He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it.
I was put into jail as I was going to the shoemaker's to get a shoe which was mended. When I was let out the next morning, I proceeded to finish my errand, and, having put on my mended shoe, joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct; and in half an hour -- for the horse was soon tackled -- was in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off, and then the State was nowhere to be seen.
There's no greater threat to our independence, to our cherished freedoms and personal liberties than the continual, relentless injection of these insidious poisons into our system. We must decide whether we cherish independence from drugs, without which there is no freedom.
A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.
To seek the redress of grievances by going to law, is like sheep running for shelter to a bramble bush.
Every instance of a man's suffering the penalty of the law is an instance of the failure of that penalty in effecting its purpose, which is to deter.
Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.
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.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.
I existed in a world that never is - the prison of the mind.
Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.
Since 1957, black people have experienced double-digit unemployment - in good times and bad times. Look at the population of African Americans in prison. They represent more than half the population of prisoners in the country, 55 percent of those on death row.
