Vices are not crimes.
It is true you cannot eat freedom and you cannot power machinery with democracy. But then neither can political prisoners turn on the light in the cells of a dictatorship.
Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?
As we grow in wisdom, we pardon more freely.
He who opens a school door, closes a prison.
Pardon is the virtue of victory.
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.
It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.
In jail a man has no personality. He is a minor disposal problem and a few entries on reports. Nobody cares who loves or hates him, what he looks like, what he did with his life. Nobody reacts to him unless he gives trouble. Nobody abuses him. All that is asked of him is that he go quietly to the right cell and remain quiet when he gets there. There is nothing to fight against, nothing to be mad at. The jailers are quiet men without animosity or sadism.
Every instance of a man's suffering the penalty of the law is an instance of the failure of that penalty in effecting its purpose, which is to deter.
I don't like being famous - it is like a prison. And driving for Ferrari would make it far worse.
Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.
Concepts of justice must have hands and feet to carry out justice in every case in the shortest possible time and the lowest possible cost. That is the challenge to every lawyer and judge in America.
To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.
When it comes to freedom, we are but prisoners of our own desires.
The uneven impact of actual enforcement measures tends to mirror and reinforce more general patterns of discrimination (along socioeconomic, racial and ethnic, sexual, and perhaps generational lines) within the society. As a consequence, such enforcement (ineffective as it may be in producing conformity) almost certainly reinforces feelings of alienation already prevalent within major segments of the population.
The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.
There is no greater punishment of wickedness that that it is dissatisfied with itself and its deeds.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
It is certain that the study of human psychology, if it were undertaken exclusively in prisons, would also lead to misrepresentation and absurd generalizations.
Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
The perfection of a thing consists in its essence; there are perfect criminals, as there are men of perfect probity.
Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.
It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.
