I was put into jail as I was going to the shoemaker's to get a shoe which was mended. When I was let out the next morning, I proceeded to finish my errand, and, having put on my mended shoe, joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct; and in half an hour -- for the horse was soon tackled -- was in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off, and then the State was nowhere to be seen.
We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business.
America is the land of the second chance – and when the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life.
I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice.
I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.
Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.
The world itself is but a large prison, out of which some are daily led to execution.
A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.
Whatever is worthy to be loved for anything is worthy of preservation. A wise and dispassionate legislator, if any such should ever arise among men, will not condemn to death him who has done or is likely to do more service than injury to society. Blocks and gibbets are the nearest objects with legislators, and their business is never with hopes or with virtues.
A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards, as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.
The only difference between me and my fellow actors is that I've spent more time in jail.
A variety in punishment is of utility, as well as a proportion.
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.
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.
On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break.
Steal goods and you’ll go to prison, steal lands and you are a king.
A sick person is a prisoner.
The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.
The uneven impact of actual enforcement measures tends to mirror and reinforce more general patterns of discrimination (along socioeconomic, racial and ethnic, sexual, and perhaps generational lines) within the society. As a consequence, such enforcement (ineffective as it may be in producing conformity) almost certainly reinforces feelings of alienation already prevalent within major segments of the population.
Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.
To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.
Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.
There are few better measures of the concern a society has for its individual members and its own well being than the way it handles criminals.
By noiselessly going to a prison a civil-resister ensures a calm atmosphere.
