Quotes

I am an expert of electricity. My father occupied the chair of applied electricity at the state prison.

A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.

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.

The only difference between me and my fellow actors is that I've spent more time in jail.

It was only when I lay there on the rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not between states nor between social classes nor between political parties, but right through every human heart, through all human hearts. And that is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me, bless you, prison, for having been a part of my life.

No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.

It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.

I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.

Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.

Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.

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.

The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.

The number of laws is constantly growing in all countries and, owing to this, what is called crime is very often not a crime at all, for it contains no element of violence or harm.

What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor.

Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached.

Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.

Crime is a logical extension of the sort of behavior that often [is] considered perfectly respectable in legitimate business.

It is true you cannot eat freedom and you cannot power machinery with democracy. But then neither can political prisoners turn on the light in the cells of a dictatorship.

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.

No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, that can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.

We shall not yield to violence. We shall not be deprived of union freedoms. We shall never agree with sending people to prison for their convictions.

America is the land of the second chance – and when the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life.

Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X came out of prison stronger.

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

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.