Quotes

I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky.

So justice while she winks at crimes, Stumbles on innocence sometimes.

Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a God.

No man should be judge in his own case.

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

Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.

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.

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

Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future lives and crimes to society.

Faults of the head are punished in this world, those of the heart in another; but as most of our vices are compound, so also is their punishment.

Since 1957, black people have experienced double-digit unemployment - in good times and bad times. Look at the population of African Americans in prison. They represent more than half the population of prisoners in the country, 55 percent of those on death row.

America is the land of the second chance – and when the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life.

It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.

Man is condemned to be free.

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

What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor.

A sick person is a prisoner.

Nor stony tower, nor walls of beaten brass, Nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron, Can be retentive to the strength of spirit; But life, being weary of these worldly bars, Never lacks power to dismiss itself.

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

We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business.

The perfection of a thing consists in its essence; there are perfect criminals, as there are men of perfect probity.

No man survives when freedom fails. The best men rot in filthy jails, and those who cry 'appease, appease' are hanged by those they tried to please.

It was only when I lay there on the rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not between states nor between social classes nor between political parties, but right through every human heart, through all human hearts. And that is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me, bless you, prison, for having been a part of my life.

Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.

To trial bring her stolen charms, and let her prison be my arms.