Quotes

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.

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

Concepts of justice must have hands and feet to carry out justice in every case in the shortest possible time and the lowest possible cost. That is the challenge to every lawyer and judge in America.

Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.

To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.

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

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.

We are prisoners of ideas.

He who profits by a crime commits it.

There is a point at which even justice does injury.

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

He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it.

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

It is certain that the study of human psychology, if it were undertaken exclusively in prisons, would also lead to misrepresentation and absurd generalizations.

To try to raise a son from inside the prison walls is a very difficult thing. But I want to say to the world my son at 16 was the one who tried the most to get me out of prison.
~Jim Bakker

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

I existed in a world that never is - the prison of the mind.

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

Extreme justice is extreme injustice.

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.

The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business.

Prison makes you a better judge of character. You pick up on people much faster.

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

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.”

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.