Quotes

It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.

Crime is a logical extension of the sort of behavior that often [is] considered perfectly respectable in legitimate business.

The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.

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.

It is not at the table, but in prison, that you learn who your true friends are.

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.

We are prisoners of ideas.

It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.

A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.

If you want total security, go to prison. There you’re fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking…is freedom.

Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilization.

They took away my money, my family, and my security. Why couldn't they destroy my ideas? We will question them in court tomorrow as we trigger The Revolution of all revolutions!

What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.

The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.

We have initiated programs for re-entry offenders, since some 500,000 to 600,000 offenders will come out of prison each year for the next three or four years. We want to have positive alternatives when they come back to the community.

How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.

It is impossible to go through life without trust: That is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.

The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.

They were being driven to a prison, through no fault of their own, in all probability for life. In comparison, how much easier it would be to walk to the gallows than to this tomb of living horrors!

No crime has been without a precedent.

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.

Punishment, that is the justice for the unjust.

We shall not yield to violence. We shall not be deprived of union freedoms. We shall never agree with sending people to prison for their convictions.

The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.