Quotes

Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.

They were being driven to a prison, through no fault of their own, in all probability for life. In comparison, how much easier it would be to walk to the gallows than to this tomb of living horrors!

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. I did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar.

In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.

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

The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.

Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X came out of prison stronger.

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.

Organized crime in America takes in over forty billion dollars a year. This is quite a profitable sum, especially when one considers that the Mafia spends very little for office supplies.

While crime is punished it yet increases.

I am an expert of electricity. My father occupied the chair of applied electricity at the state prison.

They took away my money, my family, and my security. Why couldn't they destroy my ideas? We will question them in court tomorrow as we trigger The Revolution of all revolutions!

Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts.

We who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments.

If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.

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

Crime succeeds by sudden despatch; honest counsels gain vigor by delay.

I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.

Federal prison, if you get any of it, you're going to have to do 85% of it. And the reason why I called it that is because I had a friend who got sent to the federal joint and his whole... it wasn't about him being in jail. He cried about the 85%.

When it comes to freedom, we are but prisoners of our own desires.

Before we can diminish our sufferings from the ill-controlled aggressive assaults of fellow citizens, we must renounce the philosophy of punishment, the obsolete, vengeful penal attitude. In its place we would seek a comprehensive, constructive social attitude - therapeutic in some instances, restraining in some instances, but preventive in its total social impact. In the last analysis this becomes a question of personal morals and values. No matter how glorified or how piously disguised, vengeance as a human motive must be personally repudiated by each and every one of us.

It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.

No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, that can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.

A sick person is a prisoner.

Society has used the juvenile courts to create a caste system where there are throw-away people.