I have been studying how I may compare this prison where I live unto the world; Shut up in the prison of their own consciences.
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.
The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.
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.
In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it.
Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.
The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.
It is not at the table, but in prison, that you learn who your true friends are.
By noiselessly going to a prison a civil-resister ensures a calm atmosphere.
Hanging was the worst use a man could be put to.
Federal prison, if you get any of it, you're going to have to do 85% of it. And the reason why I called it that is because I had a friend who got sent to the federal joint and his whole... it wasn't about him being in jail. He cried about the 85%.
One crime has to be concealed by another.
If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.
The uneven impact of actual enforcement measures tends to mirror and reinforce more general patterns of discrimination (along socioeconomic, racial and ethnic, sexual, and perhaps generational lines) within the society. As a consequence, such enforcement (ineffective as it may be in producing conformity) almost certainly reinforces feelings of alienation already prevalent within major segments of the population.
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.
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.
One crime is everything; two nothing.
Forgiveness, that noblest of all self-denial, is a virtue which he alone who can practise in himself can willingly believe in another.
Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.
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.
Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.
