I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.
We have our own system, ... and journalists in our system are not put in prison for embarrassing the government by revealing things the government might not wish to have revealed. The important thing is that our system, under which journalists can write without fear or favor, should continue.
He had drawn many a thousand of these rations in prisons and camps, and though he'd never had an opportunity to weight them on scales, and although, being a man of timid nature, he knew no way of standing up for his rights, he, like every other prisoner, had discovered long ago that honest weight was never to be found in the bread-cutting. There was short weight in every ration. The only point was how short. So every day you took a look to soothe your soul - today, maybe, they haven't snitched any.
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.
The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.
As we grow in wisdom, we pardon more freely.
Faults of the head are punished in this world, those of the heart in another; but as most of our vices are compound, so also is their punishment.
Written laws are like spiders' webs, and will, like them, only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful will easily break through them.
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.
There is no greater punishment of wickedness that that it is dissatisfied with itself and its deeds.
When you are younger you get blamed for crimes you never committed and when you're older you begin to get credit for virtues you never possessed. It evens itself out.
He who opens a school door, closes a prison.
Crimes generally punish themselves.
Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.
It is impossible to go through life without trust: That is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.
Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.
Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.
Every crime has, in the moment of its perpetration, Its own avenging angel--dark misgiving, An ominous sinking at the inmost heart.
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.
Most people fancy themselves innocent of those crimes of which they cannot be convicted.
One man meets an infamous punishment for that crime which confers a diadem upon another.
We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.
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.
If you share the crime of your friend, you make it your own.
