Quotes

You utter a vow, or forge a signature, and you may find yourself bound for life to a monastery, a woman, or prison.

Trial by jury itself, instead of being a security to persons who are accused, shall be a delusion, a mockery, and a snare.

In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.

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.

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

There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.

What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.

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

Hanging was the worst use a man could be put to.

We are prisoners of ideas.

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.

The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.

I can tell you this on a stack of Bibles: prisons are archaic, brutal, unregenerative, overcrowded hell holes where the inmates are treated like animals with absolutely not one humane thought given to what they are going to do once they are released. You're an animal in a cage and you're treated like one.

When you are younger you get blamed for crimes you never committed and when you're older you begin to get credit for virtues you never possessed. It evens itself out.

Wherever any one is against his will, that is to him a prison.

If you want total security, go to prison. There you’re fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking…is freedom.

Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.

We have our own system, ... and journalists in our system are not put in prison for embarrassing the government by revealing things the government might not wish to have revealed. The important thing is that our system, under which journalists can write without fear or favor, should continue.

The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.

It is hard, but it is excellent, to find the right knowledge of when correction is necessary and when grace doth most avail.

No crime has been without a precedent.

I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.

Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.

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.