Quotes

In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.

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

You utter a vow, or forge a signature, and you may find yourself bound for life to a monastery, a woman, or prison.

Trial by jury itself, instead of being a security to persons who are accused, shall be a delusion, a mockery, and a snare.

The severest justice may not always be the best policy.

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

No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, that can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.

To seek the redress of grievances by going to law, is like sheep running for shelter to a bramble bush.

Shyness is the prison of the heart.

Nor stony tower, nor walls of beaten brass, Nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron, Can be retentive to the strength of spirit; But life, being weary of these worldly bars, Never lacks power to dismiss itself.

Organized crime in America takes in over forty billion dollars a year. This is quite a profitable sum, especially when one considers that the Mafia spends very little for office supplies.

In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.

You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.

Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.

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

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.

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.

No man should be judge in his own case.

The uneven impact of actual enforcement measures tends to mirror and reinforce more general patterns of discrimination (along socioeconomic, racial and ethnic, sexual, and perhaps generational lines) within the society. As a consequence, such enforcement (ineffective as it may be in producing conformity) almost certainly reinforces feelings of alienation already prevalent within major segments of the population.

Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts.

Women now have choices. They can be married, not married, have a job, not have a job, be married with children, unmarried with children. Men have the same choice we've always had: work, or prison.

He who profits by a crime commits it.

The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They keep returning to the same things.

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.

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.