Quotes

I never told a victim story about my imprisonment. Instead, I told a transformation story - about how prison changed my outlook, about how I saw that communication, truth, and trust are at the heart of power.

Crime succeeds by sudden despatch; honest counsels gain vigor by delay.

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

Crimes generally punish themselves.

Prison makes you a better judge of character. You pick up on people much faster.

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 object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.

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.

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.

The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.

I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice.

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

To trial bring her stolen charms, and let her prison be my arms.

Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them.

In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.

Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.

No crime has been without a precedent.

The only difference between me and my fellow actors is that I've spent more time in jail.

On average, drug prisoners spend more time in federal prison than rapists, who often get out on early release because of the overcrowding in prison caused by the Drug War.

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

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.

We shall fight against them, throw them in prisons and destroy them.

The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.

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.

Extreme justice is extreme injustice.