What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor.
It was only when I lay there on the rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not between states nor between social classes nor between political parties, but right through every human heart, through all human hearts. And that is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me, bless you, prison, for having been a part of my life.
Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.
While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.
I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.
To trial bring her stolen charms, and let her prison be my arms.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.
It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.
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.
On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break.
We are prisoners of ideas.
The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.
Nor stony tower, nor walls of beaten brass, Nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron, Can be retentive to the strength of spirit; But life, being weary of these worldly bars, Never lacks power to dismiss itself.
Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached.
While crime is punished it yet increases.
Here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to be to restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work.
A sick person is a prisoner.
If two people fight on the street, whose fault is it? Who is the criminal? It is the government’s responsibility because the government has not educated the people to not make mistakes. The people have inadequate, incompetent education, so they make mistakes! It is such a fraud.
One man meets an infamous punishment for that crime which confers a diadem upon another.
I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up...I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through, before they could get to be as free as I was.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.
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.
As we grow in wisdom, we pardon more freely.
