We are prisoners of ideas.
The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business.
Society has used the juvenile courts to create a caste system where there are throw-away people.
~James Bell
If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.
A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
As we grow in wisdom, we pardon more freely.
There's no greater threat to our independence, to our cherished freedoms and personal liberties than the continual, relentless injection of these insidious poisons into our system. We must decide whether we cherish independence from drugs, without which there is no freedom.
On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break.
Prison makes you a better judge of character. You pick up on people much faster.
Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
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.
There are dreadful punishments enacted against thieves; but it were much better to make such good provisions, by which every man might be put in a method how to live, and so to be preserved from the fatal necessity of stealing and dying for it.
I don't like being famous - it is like a prison. And driving for Ferrari would make it far worse.
We're in a war. People who blast some pot on a casual basis are guilty of treason.
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.
Trial by jury itself, instead of being a security to persons who are accused, shall be a delusion, a mockery, and a snare.
Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.
The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.
Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.
I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.
Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.
It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.
Prosecution I have managed to avoid; but I have been arrested, charged in a police court, have refused to be bound over, and thereupon have been unconditionally released - to my great regret; for I have always wanted to know what going to prison was like.
