When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
One crime has to be concealed by another.
He was a first-time nonviolent possible offender, ... And under the mandatory minimums, he was put in prison for 15 years. Not only does the punishment not fit the crime, but the mandatory minimums don't give judges any discretion to look at the background of the case, to read into the specifics of the case. I don't know a judge who really is in favor of the mandatory minimums.
We have initiated programs for re-entry offenders, since some 500,000 to 600,000 offenders will come out of prison each year for the next three or four years. We want to have positive alternatives when they come back to the community.
Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.
It is impossible to go through life without trust: That is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.
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%.
In my country we go to prison first and then become President.
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.”
How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.
Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.
Reality becomes a prison to those who can’t get out of it.
It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.
Wherever any one is against his will, that is to him a prison.
I am an expert of electricity. My father occupied the chair of applied electricity at the state prison.
I can work for the Lord in or out of prison.
The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.
Society has used the juvenile courts to create a caste system where there are throw-away people.
~James Bell
I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.
No crime has been without a precedent.
You utter a vow, or forge a signature, and you may find yourself bound for life to a monastery, a woman, or prison.
Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached.
Written laws are like spiders' webs, and will, like them, only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful will easily break through them.
I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.
In jail a man has no personality. He is a minor disposal problem and a few entries on reports. Nobody cares who loves or hates him, what he looks like, what he did with his life. Nobody reacts to him unless he gives trouble. Nobody abuses him. All that is asked of him is that he go quietly to the right cell and remain quiet when he gets there. There is nothing to fight against, nothing to be mad at. The jailers are quiet men without animosity or sadism.
