Quotes

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

No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.

No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, that can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.

Money will determine whether the accused goes to prison or walks out of the courtroom a free man.

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

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.

Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.

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

Nor stony tower, nor walls of beaten brass, Nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron, Can be retentive to the strength of spirit; But life, being weary of these worldly bars, Never lacks power to dismiss itself.

The number of laws is constantly growing in all countries and, owing to this, what is called crime is very often not a crime at all, for it contains no element of violence or harm.

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

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.

Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future lives and crimes to society.

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

Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X came out of prison stronger.

I have never been contained except I made the prison.

In jail a man has no personality. He is a minor disposal problem and a few entries on reports. Nobody cares who loves or hates him, what he looks like, what he did with his life. Nobody reacts to him unless he gives trouble. Nobody abuses him. All that is asked of him is that he go quietly to the right cell and remain quiet when he gets there. There is nothing to fight against, nothing to be mad at. The jailers are quiet men without animosity or sadism.

Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.

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

A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards, as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.

In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.

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

A country is in a bad state, which is governed only by laws; because a thousand things occur for which laws cannot provide, and where authority ought to interpose.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

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