Quotes

Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?

If you want total security, go to prison. There you’re fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking…is freedom.

We shall not yield to violence. We shall not be deprived of union freedoms. We shall never agree with sending people to prison for their convictions.

Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.

While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.

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.”

There are few better measures of the concern a society has for its individual members and its own well being than the way it handles criminals.

Show me the prison, Show me the jail, Show me the prisoner whose life has gone stale. And I'll show you a young man with so many reasons why And there, but for fortune, go you or I.

Steal goods and you’ll go to prison, steal lands and you are a king.

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

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.

Experts and the educated elite have replaced what worked with what sounded good. Society was far more civilized before they took over our schools, prisons, welfare programs, police departments and courts. It's high time we ran these people out of our lives and went back to common sense.

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.

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

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.

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.

A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.

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.

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

Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.

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

There is no peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war - at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.

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.

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