Quotes

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

They were being driven to a prison, through no fault of their own, in all probability for life. In comparison, how much easier it would be to walk to the gallows than to this tomb of living horrors!

Money will determine whether the accused goes to prison or walks out of the courtroom a free man.

Extreme justice is extreme injustice.

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.

I just remember that disturbing feeling of walking into that prison, the complete loss of privacy, the complete loss of stimulation, dignity.

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

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

Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.

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.

If you share the crime of your friend, you make it your own.

The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.

Do not lay on the multitude the blame that is due to a few.

Law is merely the expression of the will of the strongest for the time being, and therefore laws have no fixity, but shift from generation to generation.

So justice while she winks at crimes, Stumbles on innocence sometimes.

It is true you cannot eat freedom and you cannot power machinery with democracy. But then neither can political prisoners turn on the light in the cells of a dictatorship.

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

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

A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards, as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.

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.

The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.

A country is in a bad state, which is governed only by laws; because a thousand things occur for which laws cannot provide, and where authority ought to interpose.

If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.