Quotes

The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.

I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.

Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

Steal goods and you’ll go to prison, steal lands and you are a king.

We who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments.

I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.

How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.

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

Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.

The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.

It is hard, but it is excellent, to find the right knowledge of when correction is necessary and when grace doth most avail.

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.

Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.

No man should be judge in his own case.

I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.

In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.

The torment of human frustration, whatever its immediate cause, is the knowledge that the self is in prison, its vital force and 'mangled mind' leaking away in lonely, wasteful self-conflict.

In prison, you get the chance to see who really loves you.

Vices are not crimes.

Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.

If you share the crime of your friend, you make it your own.

On average, drug prisoners spend more time in federal prison than rapists, who often get out on early release because of the overcrowding in prison caused by the Drug War.

One crime is everything; two nothing.