Quotes

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

They're not supposed to show prison films in prison. Especially ones that are about escaping.

The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.

I can work for the Lord in or out of prison.

A sick person is a prisoner.

Whatever is worthy to be loved for anything is worthy of preservation. A wise and dispassionate legislator, if any such should ever arise among men, will not condemn to death him who has done or is likely to do more service than injury to society. Blocks and gibbets are the nearest objects with legislators, and their business is never with hopes or with virtues.

There is a point at which even justice does injury.

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

Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.

I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.

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

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

The perfection of a thing consists in its essence; there are perfect criminals, as there are men of perfect probity.

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.

Extreme justice is extreme injustice.

Show me the prison, Show me the jail, Show me the prisoner whose life has gone stale. And I'll show you a young man with so many reasons why And there, but for fortune, go you or I.

We who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments.

The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.

Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.

The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.

It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.

Vices are not crimes.

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

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.

It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.