Since 1957, black people have experienced double-digit unemployment - in good times and bad times. Look at the population of African Americans in prison. They represent more than half the population of prisoners in the country, 55 percent of those on death row.
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.
Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
Three hundred years ago a prisoner condemned to the Tower of London carved on the wall of his cell this sentiment to keep up his spirits during his long imprisonment: “It is not adversity that kills, but the impatience with which we bear adversity.”
I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.
Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.
Crime succeeds by sudden despatch; honest counsels gain vigor by delay.
It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.
The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.
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.
It is hard, but it is excellent, to find the right knowledge of when correction is necessary and when grace doth most avail.
We are prisoners of ideas.
We shall not yield to violence. We shall not be deprived of union freedoms. We shall never agree with sending people to prison for their convictions.
The difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion is the thickness of a prison walls.
The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.
No man survives when freedom fails. The best men rot in filthy jails, and those who cry 'appease, appease' are hanged by those they tried to please.
What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.
The torment of human frustration, whatever its immediate cause, is the knowledge that the self is in prison, its vital force and 'mangled mind' leaking away in lonely, wasteful self-conflict.
A variety in punishment is of utility, as well as a proportion.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.
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 object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.
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.
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.
