When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
If two people fight on the street, whose fault is it? Who is the criminal? It is the government’s responsibility because the government has not educated the people to not make mistakes. The people have inadequate, incompetent education, so they make mistakes! It is such a fraud.
Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.
Crime is a logical extension of the sort of behavior that often [is] considered perfectly respectable in legitimate business.
The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.
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.
Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts.
There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.
Vices are not crimes.
Body is a home, a prison and a grave.
What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.
While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.
The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.
Every crime has, in the moment of its perpetration, Its own avenging angel--dark misgiving, An ominous sinking at the inmost heart.
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.
I have been studying how I may compare This prison where I live unto the world; And, for because the world is populous, And here is not a creature but myself, I cannot do it. Yet I'll hammer it out.
Reality becomes a prison to those who can’t get out of it.
When is conduct a crime, and when is a crime not a crime? When Somebody Up There -- a monarch, a dictator, a Pope, a legislator -- so decrees.
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.
If you treat prisoners well, they will be less angry, less inclined to violence inside prison, less likely to provoke violent actions by guards, less likely to have reason to file brutality lawsuits that cost taxpayers a bundle and waste administrators' time. And most important, well-treated prisoners will be less likely to leave prison angrier, more vicious and more inclined to criminal behavior than when they went in.
A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.
In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
Shyness is the prison of the heart.
The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
We are prisoners of ideas.
