To try to raise a son from inside the prison walls is a very difficult thing. But I want to say to the world my son at 16 was the one who tried the most to get me out of prison.
~Jim Bakker
If you want total security, go to prison. There you’re fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking…is freedom.
Self is the only prison that can bind the soul.
Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.
Wicked deeds are generally done, even with impunity, for the mere desire of occupation.
The public have more interest in the punishment of an injury than he who receives it.
As we grow in wisdom, we pardon more freely.
So justice while she winks at crimes, Stumbles on innocence sometimes.
To trial bring her stolen charms, and let her prison be my arms.
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.
The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their own kind.
In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break.
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.
Three hundred years ago a prisoner condemned to the Tower of London carved on the wall of his cell this sentiment to keep up his spirits during his long imprisonment: “It is not adversity that kills, but the impatience with which we bear adversity.”
Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a God.
Do not lay on the multitude the blame that is due to a few.
There are dreadful punishments enacted against thieves; but it were much better to make such good provisions, by which every man might be put in a method how to live, and so to be preserved from the fatal necessity of stealing and dying for it.
The only difference between me and my fellow actors is that I've spent more time in jail.
Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.
Crime is a logical extension of the sort of behavior that often [is] considered perfectly respectable in legitimate business.
Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.
If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.
