Quotes

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.

He had drawn many a thousand of these rations in prisons and camps, and though he'd never had an opportunity to weight them on scales, and although, being a man of timid nature, he knew no way of standing up for his rights, he, like every other prisoner, had discovered long ago that honest weight was never to be found in the bread-cutting. There was short weight in every ration. The only point was how short. So every day you took a look to soothe your soul - today, maybe, they haven't snitched any.

Every crime has, in the moment of its perpetration, Its own avenging angel--dark misgiving, An ominous sinking at the inmost heart.

The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.

While crime is punished it yet increases.

Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.

Crime is a logical extension of the sort of behavior that often [is] considered perfectly respectable in legitimate business.

Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.

To trial bring her stolen charms, and let her prison be my arms.

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.

The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They keep returning to the same things.

The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business.

I can work for the Lord in or out of prison.

If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.

You utter a vow, or forge a signature, and you may find yourself bound for life to a monastery, a woman, or prison.

One crime is everything; two nothing.

If you strike at, imprison, or kill us, out of our prisons or graves we will still evoke a spirit that will thwart you, and perhaps, raise a force that will destroy you! We defy you! Do your worst!

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 Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.

Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.

The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.

I can tell you this on a stack of Bibles: prisons are archaic, brutal, unregenerative, overcrowded hell holes where the inmates are treated like animals with absolutely not one humane thought given to what they are going to do once they are released. You're an animal in a cage and you're treated like one.

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.

Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.