I have never been contained except I made the prison.
Adversities such as being homeless and going to prison has made many people stronger.
Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a God.
Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.
Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.
A variety in punishment is of utility, as well as a proportion.
In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.
A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.
When it comes to freedom, we are but prisoners of our own desires.
No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
Steal goods and you’ll go to prison, steal lands and you are a king.
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.
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.
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.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, that can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.
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.
To trial bring her stolen charms, and let her prison be my arms.
While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.
It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.
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.
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.
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.
In prison, you get the chance to see who really loves you.
