Quotes

It is hard, but it is excellent, to find the right knowledge of when correction is necessary and when grace doth most avail.

One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.

Body is a home, a prison and a grave.

The torment of human frustration, whatever its immediate cause, is the knowledge that the self is in prison, its vital force and 'mangled mind' leaking away in lonely, wasteful self-conflict.

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

They took away my money, my family, and my security. Why couldn't they destroy my ideas? We will question them in court tomorrow as we trigger The Revolution of all revolutions!

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.

Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.

Let us remember that justice must be observed even to the lowest.

I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky.

There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.

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.

The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.

It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.

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.

Prison makes you a better judge of character. You pick up on people much faster.

The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.

Before we can diminish our sufferings from the ill-controlled aggressive assaults of fellow citizens, we must renounce the philosophy of punishment, the obsolete, vengeful penal attitude. In its place we would seek a comprehensive, constructive social attitude - therapeutic in some instances, restraining in some instances, but preventive in its total social impact. In the last analysis this becomes a question of personal morals and values. No matter how glorified or how piously disguised, vengeance as a human motive must be personally repudiated by each and every one of us.

Do not lay on the multitude the blame that is due to a few.

What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.

We're in a war. People who blast some pot on a casual basis are guilty of treason.

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.

Society has used the juvenile courts to create a caste system where there are throw-away people.

Whatever you think of de Sade, he was a complex figure and we should not look for easy answers with him. He was, strangely perhaps, against the death penalty, and he was never put in prison for murders or anything like that.

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