Quotes

No man should be judge in his own case.

Punishment, that is the justice for the unjust.

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

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

To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.

When you are younger you get blamed for crimes you never committed and when you're older you begin to get credit for virtues you never possessed. It evens itself out.

In jail a man has no personality. He is a minor disposal problem and a few entries on reports. Nobody cares who loves or hates him, what he looks like, what he did with his life. Nobody reacts to him unless he gives trouble. Nobody abuses him. All that is asked of him is that he go quietly to the right cell and remain quiet when he gets there. There is nothing to fight against, nothing to be mad at. The jailers are quiet men without animosity or sadism.

The solution to our drug problem is not in incarceration.

The perfection of a thing consists in its essence; there are perfect criminals, as there are men of perfect probity.

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!

Prison, dungeons, blessed places where evil is impossible because they are the crossroads of all the evil in the world. One cannot commit evil in hell.

Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.

What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor.

A variety in punishment is of utility, as well as a proportion.

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

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

There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.

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

Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

I can tell you this on a stack of Bibles: prisons are archaic, brutal, unregenerative, overcrowded hell holes where the inmates are treated like animals with absolutely not one humane thought given to what they are going to do once they are released. You're an animal in a cage and you're treated like one.

The severest justice may not always be the best policy.

I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up...I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through, before they could get to be as free as I was. I did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar.

Whatever you think of de Sade, he was a complex figure and we should not look for easy answers with him. He was, strangely perhaps, against the death penalty, and he was never put in prison for murders or anything like that.

While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.

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.