Quotes

As we grow in wisdom, we pardon more freely.

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

Body is a home, a prison and a grave.

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

One man meets an infamous punishment for that crime which confers a diadem upon another.

Forgiveness, that noblest of all self-denial, is a virtue which he alone who can practise in himself can willingly believe in another.

Some laws of state aimed at curbing crime are even more criminal.

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.

Care should be taken that the punishment does not exceed the guilt; and also that some men do not suffer for offenses for which others are not even indicted.

Self is the only prison that can bind the soul.

On average, drug prisoners spend more time in federal prison than rapists, who often get out on early release because of the overcrowding in prison caused by the Drug War.

Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.

The severest justice may not always be the best policy.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.”

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

What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.

Crime is a logical extension of the sort of behavior that often [is] considered perfectly respectable in legitimate business.

If we look at Houston, which is a very environmentally toxic place, we find that it has one of the highest levels of young men going to prison and also among the highest levels of illiteracy in the country.

I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.