Quotes

Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X came out of prison stronger.

The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.

No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.

No man survives when freedom fails. The best men rot in filthy jails, and those who cry 'appease, appease' are hanged by those they tried to please.

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.

Prison, dungeons, blessed places where evil is impossible because they are the crossroads of all the evil in the world. One cannot commit evil in hell.

I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up...I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through, before they could get to be as free as I was. I did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar.

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 uneven impact of actual enforcement measures tends to mirror and reinforce more general patterns of discrimination (along socioeconomic, racial and ethnic, sexual, and perhaps generational lines) within the society. As a consequence, such enforcement (ineffective as it may be in producing conformity) almost certainly reinforces feelings of alienation already prevalent within major segments of the population.

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

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.

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

We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.

Care should be taken that the punishment does not exceed the guilt; and also that some men do not suffer for offenses for which others are not even indicted.

Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.

Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

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.”

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

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.

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

To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.