Quotes

You utter a vow, or forge a signature, and you may find yourself bound for life to a monastery, a woman, or prison.

I was in prison, and you came unto me. Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.
~(Jesus Christ) Matthew 25:36, 40

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

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.

Extreme justice is extreme injustice.

If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.

Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.

If you share the crime of your friend, you make it your own.

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

The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.

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

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.

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.

Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X came out of prison stronger.

Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.

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

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.

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

Hanging was the worst use a man could be put to.

We're in a war. People who blast some pot on a casual basis are guilty of treason.

To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.

Any punishment that does not correct, that can merely rouse rebellion in whoever has to endure it, is a piece of gratuitous infamy which makes those who impose it more guilty in the eyes of humanity, good sense and reason, nay a hundred times more guilty than the victim on whom the punishment is inflicted.

When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.

Concepts of justice must have hands and feet to carry out justice in every case in the shortest possible time and the lowest possible cost. That is the challenge to every lawyer and judge in America.

One man meets an infamous punishment for that crime which confers a diadem upon another.