The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.
In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
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.
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.
Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.
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.
Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.
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.
Most people fancy themselves innocent of those crimes of which they cannot be convicted.
Shyness is the prison of the heart.
Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.
No crime has been without a precedent.
Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.
The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.
Every crime has, in the moment of its perpetration, Its own avenging angel--dark misgiving, An ominous sinking at the inmost heart.
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 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.
Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.
The only effect of public punishment is to show the rabble how bravely it can be borne; and that every one who hath lost a toe-nail hath suffered worse.
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.
It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.
Pardon is the virtue of victory.
Society has used the juvenile courts to create a caste system where there are throw-away people.
~James Bell
If it's near dinner-time, the foreman takes out his watch when the jury has retired, and says: "Dear me, gentlemen, ten minutes to five, I declare! I dine at five, gentlemen." "So do I," says everybody else, except two men who ought to have dined at three and seem more than half disposed to stand out in consequence. The foreman smiles, and puts up his watch:--"Well, gentlemen, what do we say, plaintiff or defendant, gentlemen?
