Quotes

The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.

I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.

I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.

The torment of human frustration, whatever its immediate cause, is the knowledge that the self is in prison, its vital force and 'mangled mind' leaking away in lonely, wasteful self-conflict.

He who profits by a crime commits it.

Wicked deeds are generally done, even with impunity, for the mere desire of occupation.

Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.

The best situation of all, and one frequently utilized, is for jails and prisons to allow volunteer ministers of all faiths to enter prisons and offer their services to the inmates who want them. That way, the religious needs of inmates are met but without government funds being spent.

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.

Vices are not crimes.

Self is the only prison that can bind the soul.

Justice renders to every one his due.

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

The solution to our drug problem is not in incarceration.

It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.

I can tell you this on a stack of Bibles: prisons are archaic, brutal, unregenerative, overcrowded hell holes where the inmates are treated like animals with absolutely not one humane thought given to what they are going to do once they are released. You're an animal in a cage and you're treated like one.

Since 1957, black people have experienced double-digit unemployment - in good times and bad times. Look at the population of African Americans in prison. They represent more than half the population of prisoners in the country, 55 percent of those on death row.

To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.

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

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

Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.

The contagion of crime is like that of the plague. Criminals collected together corrupt each other; they are worse than ever when at the termination of their punishment they re-enter society.

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

What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor.

The only effect of public punishment is to show the rabble how bravely it can be borne; and that every one who hath lost a toe-nail hath suffered worse.