Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.
Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.
To be at peace in crime! Ah, who can thus flatter himself.
We're in a war. People who blast some pot on a casual basis are guilty of treason.
Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our duty is to furnish it well.
The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.
I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
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.
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.
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.
In jail a man has no personality. He is a minor disposal problem and a few entries on reports. Nobody cares who loves or hates him, what he looks like, what he did with his life. Nobody reacts to him unless he gives trouble. Nobody abuses him. All that is asked of him is that he go quietly to the right cell and remain quiet when he gets there. There is nothing to fight against, nothing to be mad at. The jailers are quiet men without animosity or sadism.
Shyness is the prison of the heart.
Society has used the juvenile courts to create a caste system where there are throw-away people.
~James Bell
Reality becomes a prison to those who can’t get out of it.
Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.
The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.
Self is the only prison that can bind the soul.
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.
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.
Women now have choices. They can be married, not married, have a job, not have a job, be married with children, unmarried with children. Men have the same choice we've always had: work, or prison.
Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.
There is no peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war - at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.
Let us remember that justice must be observed even to the lowest.
