Quotes

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.

If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.

We who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments.

Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?

The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.

To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.

Pardon is the virtue of victory.

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.

When it comes to freedom, we are but prisoners of our own desires.

Every crime has, in the moment of its perpetration, Its own avenging angel--dark misgiving, An ominous sinking at the inmost heart.

The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.

Governments have tried to stop crime through punishment throughout the ages, but crime continued in the past punishment remains. Crime can only be stopped through a preventive approach in the schools. You teach the students Transcendental Meditation, and right away they’ll begin using their full brain physiology sensible and they will not get sidetracked into wrong things.

By noiselessly going to a prison a civil-resister ensures a calm atmosphere.

Justice renders to every one his due.

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.

Show me the prison, Show me the jail, Show me the prisoner whose life has gone stale. And I'll show you a young man with so many reasons why And there, but for fortune, go you or I.

To be at peace in crime! Ah, who can thus flatter himself.

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

In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.

I can work for the Lord in or out of prison.

To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.

A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.

It is safer that a bad man should not be accused, than that he should be acquitted.

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. I did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar.

To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.