One crime is everything; two nothing.
If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.
The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.
The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.
Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X came out of prison stronger.
Law is merely the expression of the will of the strongest for the time being, and therefore laws have no fixity, but shift from generation to generation.
He who profits by a crime commits it.
The world itself is but a large prison, out of which some are daily led to execution.
To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.
Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.
No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, that can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.
I was in prison, and you came unto me. Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.
~(Jesus Christ) Matthew 25:36, 40
If we look at Houston, which is a very environmentally toxic place, we find that it has one of the highest levels of young men going to prison and also among the highest levels of illiteracy in the country.
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.
We are prisoners of ideas.
Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.
Reality becomes a prison to those who can’t get out of it.
Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.
I can work for the Lord in or out of prison.
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.
Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
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 better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.
Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.