A country is in a bad state, which is governed only by laws; because a thousand things occur for which laws cannot provide, and where authority ought to interpose.
A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards, as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.
In prison, you get the chance to see who really loves you.
Let us remember that justice must be observed even to the lowest.
I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.
The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.
Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them.
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.
So justice while she winks at crimes, Stumbles on innocence sometimes.
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 perfection of a thing consists in its essence; there are perfect criminals, as there are men of perfect probity.
Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.
Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.
I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.
By noiselessly going to a prison a civil-resister ensures a calm atmosphere.
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.
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.
Federal prison, if you get any of it, you're going to have to do 85% of it. And the reason why I called it that is because I had a friend who got sent to the federal joint and his whole... it wasn't about him being in jail. He cried about the 85%.
The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.
I have been studying how I may compare This prison where I live unto the world; And, for because the world is populous, And here is not a creature but myself, I cannot do it. Yet I'll hammer it out.
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.
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.
To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.
