Quotes

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

The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.

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

One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.

Forgiveness, that noblest of all self-denial, is a virtue which he alone who can practise in himself can willingly believe in another.

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.

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

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

A sick person is a prisoner.

Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached.

It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.

Prison, dungeons, blessed places where evil is impossible because they are the crossroads of all the evil in the world. One cannot commit evil in hell.

Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.

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

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.

I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up...I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through, before they could get to be as free as I was. I did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar.

Crimes generally punish themselves.

No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.

I can work for the Lord in or out of prison.

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.

If two people fight on the street, whose fault is it? Who is the criminal? It is the government’s responsibility because the government has not educated the people to not make mistakes. The people have inadequate, incompetent education, so they make mistakes! It is such a fraud.

To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.

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.

No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.

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?