Quotes

I am an expert of electricity. My father occupied the chair of applied electricity at the state prison.

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.

If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.

Written laws are like spiders' webs, and will, like them, only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful will easily break through them.

As we grow in wisdom, we pardon more freely.

The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.

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

We are prisoners of ideas.

How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.

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

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!

The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.

The mellow sweetness of pumpkin pie off a prison spoon is something you will never forget.

Federal prison, if you get any of it, you're going to have to do 85% of it. And the reason why I called it that is because I had a friend who got sent to the federal joint and his whole... it wasn't about him being in jail. He cried about the 85%.

I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice.

The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.

Experts and the educated elite have replaced what worked with what sounded good. Society was far more civilized before they took over our schools, prisons, welfare programs, police departments and courts. It's high time we ran these people out of our lives and went back to common sense.

Man is condemned to be free.

I have never been contained except I made the prison.

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

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

Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.

The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.

Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.

One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.