Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X came out of prison stronger.
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.
Prison makes you a better judge of character. You pick up on people much faster.
If it's near dinner-time, the foreman takes out his watch when the jury has retired, and says: "Dear me, gentlemen, ten minutes to five, I declare! I dine at five, gentlemen." "So do I," says everybody else, except two men who ought to have dined at three and seem more than half disposed to stand out in consequence. The foreman smiles, and puts up his watch:--"Well, gentlemen, what do we say, plaintiff or defendant, gentlemen?
The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.
It is not at the table, but in prison, that you learn who your true friends are.
Some laws of state aimed at curbing crime are even more criminal.
Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future lives and crimes to society.
In my country we go to prison first and then become President.
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.
Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.
No man survives when freedom fails. The best men rot in filthy jails, and those who cry 'appease, appease' are hanged by those they tried to please.
By noiselessly going to a prison a civil-resister ensures a calm atmosphere.
Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.
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.
Crime succeeds by sudden despatch; honest counsels gain vigor by delay.
A country is in a bad state, which is governed only by laws; because a thousand things occur for which laws cannot provide, and where authority ought to interpose.
It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.
The world itself is but a large prison, out of which some are daily led to execution.
Shyness is the prison of the heart.
Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.
I have been studying how I may compare this prison where I live unto the world; Shut up in the prison of their own consciences.
Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a God.
Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.
One crime has to be concealed by another.
