I never told a victim story about my imprisonment. Instead, I told a transformation story - about how prison changed my outlook, about how I saw that communication, truth, and trust are at the heart of power.
No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
It is true you cannot eat freedom and you cannot power machinery with democracy. But then neither can political prisoners turn on the light in the cells of a dictatorship.
Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.
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.
The only difference between me and my fellow actors is that I've spent more time in jail.
Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.
The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.
Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.
I sometimes wish that people would put a little more emphasis upon the observance of the law than they do upon its enforcement.
Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.
What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.
A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.
Money will determine whether the accused goes to prison or walks out of the courtroom a free man.
I was in prison, and you came unto me. Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.
~(Jesus Christ) Matthew 25:36, 40
In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.
Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.
He who profits by a crime commits it.
Vices are not crimes.
Women now have choices. They can be married, not married, have a job, not have a job, be married with children, unmarried with children. Men have the same choice we've always had: work, or prison.
I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.
They're not supposed to show prison films in prison. Especially ones that are about escaping.
The public have more interest in the punishment of an injury than he who receives it.
Law is merely the expression of the will of the strongest for the time being, and therefore laws have no fixity, but shift from generation to generation.
It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.
