We are prisoners of ideas.
Crime is a logical extension of the sort of behavior that often [is] considered perfectly respectable in legitimate business.
Crime succeeds by sudden despatch; honest counsels gain vigor by delay.
You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.
A sick person is a prisoner.
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.
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.
Every crime has, in the moment of its perpetration, Its own avenging angel--dark misgiving, An ominous sinking at the inmost heart.
Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our duty is to furnish it well.
America is the land of the second chance – and when the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life.
It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.
When it comes to freedom, we are but prisoners of our own desires.
The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.
The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They keep returning to the same things.
You utter a vow, or forge a signature, and you may find yourself bound for life to a monastery, a woman, or prison.
In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
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.
If you strike at, imprison, or kill us, out of our prisons or graves we will still evoke a spirit that will thwart you, and perhaps, raise a force that will destroy you! We defy you! Do your worst!
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 is true you cannot eat freedom and you cannot power machinery with democracy. But then neither can political prisoners turn on the light in the cells of a dictatorship.
No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, that can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.
Forgiveness, that noblest of all self-denial, is a virtue which he alone who can practise in himself can willingly believe in another.
Society has used the juvenile courts to create a caste system where there are throw-away people.
~James Bell
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.
While crime is punished it yet increases.
