It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.
Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our duty is to furnish it well.
I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.
The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.
Crime is a logical extension of the sort of behavior that often [is] considered perfectly respectable in legitimate business.
Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.
The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.
I know not whether laws be right, or whether laws be wrong; All that we know who lie in gaol is that the wall is strong; And that each day is like a year, a year whose days are long.
Society has used the juvenile courts to create a caste system where there are throw-away people.
~James Bell
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.
We are prisoners of ideas.
Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X came out of prison stronger.
The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.
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.
Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.
Most people fancy themselves innocent of those crimes of which they cannot be convicted.
Wicked deeds are generally done, even with impunity, for the mere desire of occupation.
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.
In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up...I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through, before they could get to be as free as I was.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.
Prison, dungeons, blessed places where evil is impossible because they are the crossroads of all the evil in the world. One cannot commit evil in hell.
Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.
The world itself is but a large prison, out of which some are daily led to execution.
