Quotes

Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.

History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.

I was put into jail as I was going to the shoemaker's to get a shoe which was mended. When I was let out the next morning, I proceeded to finish my errand, and, having put on my mended shoe, joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct; and in half an hour -- for the horse was soon tackled -- was in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off, and then the State was nowhere to be seen.

Society has used the juvenile courts to create a caste system where there are throw-away people.

I was in prison, and you came unto me. Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.
~(Jesus Christ) Matthew 25:36, 40

Crimes generally punish themselves.

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.

Wherever any one is against his will, that is to him a prison.

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

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

Vices are not crimes.

I have been studying how I may compare this prison where I live unto the world; Shut up in the prison of their own consciences.

A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.

Reality becomes a prison to those who can’t get out of it.

The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.

There are few better measures of the concern a society has for its individual members and its own well being than the way it handles criminals.

It was only when I lay there on the rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not between states nor between social classes nor between political parties, but right through every human heart, through all human hearts. And that is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me, bless you, prison, for having been a part of my life.

I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky.

Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a God.

Faults of the head are punished in this world, those of the heart in another; but as most of our vices are compound, so also is their punishment.

Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.

By noiselessly going to a prison a civil-resister ensures a calm atmosphere.

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

It is not at the table, but in prison, that you learn who your true friends are.

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