They were being driven to a prison, through no fault of their own, in all probability for life. In comparison, how much easier it would be to walk to the gallows than to this tomb of living horrors!
Money will determine whether the accused goes to prison or walks out of the courtroom a free man.
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 it's near dinner-time, the foreman takes out his watch when the jury has retired, and says: "Dear me, gentlemen, ten minutes to five, I declare! I dine at five, gentlemen." "So do I," says everybody else, except two men who ought to have dined at three and seem more than half disposed to stand out in consequence. The foreman smiles, and puts up his watch:--"Well, gentlemen, what do we say, plaintiff or defendant, gentlemen?
Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
In jail a man has no personality. He is a minor disposal problem and a few entries on reports. Nobody cares who loves or hates him, what he looks like, what he did with his life. Nobody reacts to him unless he gives trouble. Nobody abuses him. All that is asked of him is that he go quietly to the right cell and remain quiet when he gets there. There is nothing to fight against, nothing to be mad at. The jailers are quiet men without animosity or sadism.
Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilization.
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.
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.
Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
I don't like being famous - it is like a prison. And driving for Ferrari would make it far worse.
Man is condemned to be free.
No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, that can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.
The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.
One crime is everything; two nothing.
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.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.
Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.
They're not supposed to show prison films in prison. Especially ones that are about escaping.
A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
The perfection of a thing consists in its essence; there are perfect criminals, as there are men of perfect probity.
A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.
The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.
One crime has to be concealed by another.
