Quotes

Extreme justice is extreme injustice.

I have never been contained except I made the prison.

A country is in a bad state, which is governed only by laws; because a thousand things occur for which laws cannot provide, and where authority ought to interpose.

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

Crime is a logical extension of the sort of behavior that often [is] considered perfectly respectable in legitimate business.

How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.

Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.

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.

If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.

I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.

There is no greater punishment of wickedness that that it is dissatisfied with itself and its deeds.

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

A variety in punishment is of utility, as well as a proportion.

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.

It is not at the table, but in prison, that you learn who your true friends are.

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

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.

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.

In prison, you get the chance to see who really loves you.

I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.

The only effect of public punishment is to show the rabble how bravely it can be borne; and that every one who hath lost a toe-nail hath suffered worse.

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

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

The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.

Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.