The contagion of crime is like that of the plague. Criminals collected together corrupt each other; they are worse than ever when at the termination of their punishment they re-enter society.
The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.
Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.
When it comes to freedom, we are but prisoners of our own desires.
We shall fight against them, throw them in prisons and destroy them.
There is a point at which even justice does injury.
A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.
There is no greater punishment of wickedness that that it is dissatisfied with itself and its deeds.
Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.
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.
The public have more interest in the punishment of an injury than he who receives it.
No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.
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.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
No man should be judge in his own case.
What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.
I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.
The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.
They took away my money, my family, and my security. Why couldn't they destroy my ideas? We will question them in court tomorrow as we trigger The Revolution of all revolutions!
Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.
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.
The difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion is the thickness of a prison walls.
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.
I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.
Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.
