There are few better measures of the concern a society has for its individual members and its own well being than the way it handles criminals.
The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.
Some laws of state aimed at curbing crime are even more criminal.
Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.
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.
What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.
One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.
The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.
We are prisoners of ideas.
The best situation of all, and one frequently utilized, is for jails and prisons to allow volunteer ministers of all faiths to enter prisons and offer their services to the inmates who want them. That way, the religious needs of inmates are met but without government funds being spent.
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.
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.
Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.
It is not at the table, but in prison, that you learn who your true friends are.
I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.
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.
It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.
Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.
Fear can be like a prison. It is, however, a self made prison. Many are imprisoned by fear. No one else can liberate them from this prison. Others may inspire them but they must liberate themselves.
It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.
There is no peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war - at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.
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.
Body is a home, a prison and a grave.
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.
They're not supposed to show prison films in prison. Especially ones that are about escaping.
