Prison Quotes

Here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to be to restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work.

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.

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

Hanging was the worst use a man could be put to.

Concepts of justice must have hands and feet to carry out justice in every case in the shortest possible time and the lowest possible cost. That is the challenge to every lawyer and judge in America.

I sometimes wish that people would put a little more emphasis upon the observance of the law than they do upon its enforcement.

Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.

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

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.

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.

Written laws are like spiders' webs, and will, like them, only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful will easily break through them.

Experts and the educated elite have replaced what worked with what sounded good. Society was far more civilized before they took over our schools, prisons, welfare programs, police departments and courts. It's high time we ran these people out of our lives and went back to common sense.