The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.
Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.
Virtue pardons the wicked, as the sandal-tree perfumes the axe which strikes it.
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.
The best situation of all, and one frequently utilized, is for jails and prisons to allow volunteer ministers of all faiths to enter prisons and offer their services to the inmates who want them. That way, the religious needs of inmates are met but without government funds being spent.
I have been studying how I may compare This prison where I live unto the world; And, for because the world is populous, And here is not a creature but myself, I cannot do it. Yet I'll hammer it out.
If you strike at, imprison, or kill us, out of our prisons or graves we will still evoke a spirit that will thwart you, and perhaps, raise a force that will destroy you! We defy you! Do your worst!
While crime is punished it yet increases.
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 idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.
Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached.
One man meets an infamous punishment for that crime which confers a diadem upon another.
Do not lay on the multitude the blame that is due to a few.
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.
We who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments.
Taught from infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.
The severest justice may not always be the best policy.
It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.
I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.
History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.
The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.
It is certain that the study of human psychology, if it were undertaken exclusively in prisons, would also lead to misrepresentation and absurd generalizations.
In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
