Quotes

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.

Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilization.

The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They keep returning to the same things.

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.

The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.

Faults of the head are punished in this world, those of the heart in another; but as most of our vices are compound, so also is their punishment.

Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.

It is true you cannot eat freedom and you cannot power machinery with democracy. But then neither can political prisoners turn on the light in the cells of a dictatorship.

When is conduct a crime, and when is a crime not a crime? When Somebody Up There -- a monarch, a dictator, a Pope, a legislator -- so decrees.

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

Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached.

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

One crime is everything; two nothing.

Man is condemned to be free.

We are prisoners of ideas.

Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.

The public have more interest in the punishment of an injury than he who receives it.

Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.

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

It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their own kind.

When you are younger you get blamed for crimes you never committed and when you're older you begin to get credit for virtues you never possessed. It evens itself out.

There are dreadful punishments enacted against thieves; but it were much better to make such good provisions, by which every man might be put in a method how to live, and so to be preserved from the fatal necessity of stealing and dying for it.

One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.

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