Quotes

Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.

The world itself is but a large prison, out of which some are daily led to execution.

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!

Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.

The solution to our drug problem is not in incarceration.

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

He who opens a school door, closes a prison.

A country is in a bad state, which is governed only by laws; because a thousand things occur for which laws cannot provide, and where authority ought to interpose.

I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.

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.

Shyness is the prison of the heart.

Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.

Trial by jury itself, instead of being a security to persons who are accused, shall be a delusion, a mockery, and a snare.

How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.

You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.

Man is condemned to be free.

It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.

Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrist? And what has he been after that they groan and shake their fists? And wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air? Oh they're taking him to prison for the colour of his hair.

Punishment, that is the justice for the unjust.

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 don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.

A man who has no excuse for a crime, is indeed defenseless!

The torment of human frustration, whatever its immediate cause, is the knowledge that the self is in prison, its vital force and 'mangled mind' leaking away in lonely, wasteful self-conflict.

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.