Quotes

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

It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.

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

The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.

Organized crime in America takes in over forty billion dollars a year. This is quite a profitable sum, especially when one considers that the Mafia spends very little for office supplies.

Women have worked hard; starved in prison; given of their time and lives that we might sit in the House of Commons and take part in the legislating of this country.

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.

One crime is everything; two nothing.

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.

Here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to be to restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work.

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

If two people fight on the street, whose fault is it? Who is the criminal? It is the government’s responsibility because the government has not educated the people to not make mistakes. The people have inadequate, incompetent education, so they make mistakes! It is such a fraud.

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

Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a God.

Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts.

Taught from infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.

He had drawn many a thousand of these rations in prisons and camps, and though he'd never had an opportunity to weight them on scales, and although, being a man of timid nature, he knew no way of standing up for his rights, he, like every other prisoner, had discovered long ago that honest weight was never to be found in the bread-cutting. There was short weight in every ration. The only point was how short. So every day you took a look to soothe your soul - today, maybe, they haven't snitched any.

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

As we grow in wisdom, we pardon more freely.

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

Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.

We have initiated programs for re-entry offenders, since some 500,000 to 600,000 offenders will come out of prison each year for the next three or four years. We want to have positive alternatives when they come back to the community.

Let us remember that justice must be observed even to the lowest.

The mellow sweetness of pumpkin pie off a prison spoon is something you will never forget.

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