The mellow sweetness of pumpkin pie off a prison spoon is something you will never forget.
When it comes to freedom, we are but prisoners of our own desires.
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.
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.
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.
Whatever you think of de Sade, he was a complex figure and we should not look for easy answers with him. He was, strangely perhaps, against the death penalty, and he was never put in prison for murders or anything like that.
There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.
Society has used the juvenile courts to create a caste system where there are throw-away people.
~James Bell
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.
The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.
In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.
What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor.
It is not at the table, but in prison, that you learn who your true friends are.
Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our duty is to furnish it well.
Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.
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.
It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.
Most people fancy themselves innocent of those crimes of which they cannot be convicted.
To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.
Faults of the head are punished in this world, those of the heart in another; but as most of our vices are compound, so also is their punishment.
There is a point at which even justice does injury.
I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.
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.
If we look at Houston, which is a very environmentally toxic place, we find that it has one of the highest levels of young men going to prison and also among the highest levels of illiteracy in the country.
Nor stony tower, nor walls of beaten brass, Nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron, Can be retentive to the strength of spirit; But life, being weary of these worldly bars, Never lacks power to dismiss itself.
