Quotes

Extreme justice is extreme injustice.

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.

In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.

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.

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.

Women now have choices. They can be married, not married, have a job, not have a job, be married with children, unmarried with children. Men have the same choice we've always had: work, or prison.

Steal goods and you’ll go to prison, steal lands and you are a king.

You utter a vow, or forge a signature, and you may find yourself bound for life to a monastery, a woman, or prison.

If you share the crime of your friend, you make it your own.

We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business.

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!

They're not supposed to show prison films in prison. Especially ones that are about escaping.

History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.

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.

Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.

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

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.

A variety in punishment is of utility, as well as a proportion.

There is no greater punishment of wickedness that that it is dissatisfied with itself and its deeds.

And while God had work for Paul, he found him friends both in court and prison. Let persecutors send saints to prison, God can provide a keeper for their turn.

I never told a victim story about my imprisonment. Instead, I told a transformation story - about how prison changed my outlook, about how I saw that communication, truth, and trust are at the heart of power.

The public have more interest in the punishment of an injury than he who receives it.

The solution to our drug problem is not in incarceration.

Fear can be like a prison. It is, however, a self made prison. Many are imprisoned by fear. No one else can liberate them from this prison. Others may inspire them but they must liberate themselves.