Quotes

I know not whether laws be right, or whether laws be wrong; All that we know who lie in gaol is that the wall is strong; And that each day is like a year, a year whose days are long.

Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.

Before we can diminish our sufferings from the ill-controlled aggressive assaults of fellow citizens, we must renounce the philosophy of punishment, the obsolete, vengeful penal attitude. In its place we would seek a comprehensive, constructive social attitude - therapeutic in some instances, restraining in some instances, but preventive in its total social impact. In the last analysis this becomes a question of personal morals and values. No matter how glorified or how piously disguised, vengeance as a human motive must be personally repudiated by each and every one of us.

The world itself is but a large prison, out of which some are daily led to execution.

Pardon is the virtue of victory.

Fear can be like a prison. It is, however, a self made prison. Many are imprisoned by fear. No one else can liberate them from this prison. Others may inspire them but they must liberate themselves.

Fast closed with double grills
And triple gates – the cell
To wicked souls is hell;
But to a mind that's innocent
'Tis only iron, wood and stone.

I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.

The world is a prison in which solitary confinement is preferable.

Every instance of a man's suffering the penalty of the law is an instance of the failure of that penalty in effecting its purpose, which is to deter.

When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.

We're in a war. People who blast some pot on a casual basis are guilty of treason.

A man who has no excuse for a crime, is indeed defenseless!

It is safer that a bad man should not be accused, than that he should be acquitted.

Experts and the educated elite have replaced what worked with what sounded good. Society was far more civilized before they took over our schools, prisons, welfare programs, police departments and courts. It's high time we ran these people out of our lives and went back to common sense.

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

Whatever is worthy to be loved for anything is worthy of preservation. A wise and dispassionate legislator, if any such should ever arise among men, will not condemn to death him who has done or is likely to do more service than injury to society. Blocks and gibbets are the nearest objects with legislators, and their business is never with hopes or with virtues.

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.

Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.

A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.

They're not supposed to show prison films in prison. Especially ones that are about escaping.

There's no greater threat to our independence, to our cherished freedoms and personal liberties than the continual, relentless injection of these insidious poisons into our system. We must decide whether we cherish independence from drugs, without which there is no freedom.

When is conduct a crime, and when is a crime not a crime? When Somebody Up There -- a monarch, a dictator, a Pope, a legislator -- so decrees.

Hanging was the worst use a man could be put to.

On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break.