Pardon is the virtue of victory.
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.
One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.
The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
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.
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.
Most people fancy themselves innocent of those crimes of which they cannot be convicted.
The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They keep returning to the same things.
The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.
By noiselessly going to a prison a civil-resister ensures a calm atmosphere.
The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.
Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
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.
The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.
Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts.
It is hard, but it is excellent, to find the right knowledge of when correction is necessary and when grace doth most avail.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.
Crime is a logical extension of the sort of behavior that often [is] considered perfectly respectable in legitimate business.
The severest justice may not always be the best policy.
