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.
We're in a war. People who blast some pot on a casual basis are guilty of treason.
Virtue pardons the wicked, as the sandal-tree perfumes the axe which strikes it.
Taught from infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.
To seek the redress of grievances by going to law, is like sheep running for shelter to a bramble bush.
Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.
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.
The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.
The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.
How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.
Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrist? And what has he been after that they groan and shake their fists? And wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air? Oh they're taking him to prison for the colour of his hair.
In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.
Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
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.
No crime has been without a precedent.
The only difference between me and my fellow actors is that I've spent more time in jail.
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.
I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.
We are prisoners of ideas.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
The mellow sweetness of pumpkin pie off a prison spoon is something you will never forget.
Crimes generally punish themselves.
Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.
