Quotes

I have been studying how I may compare this prison where I live unto the world; Shut up in the prison of their own consciences.

Adversities such as being homeless and going to prison has made many people stronger.

Hanging was the worst use a man could be put to.

It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their own kind.

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

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.

Man is condemned to be free.

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

If two people fight on the street, whose fault is it? Who is the criminal? It is the government’s responsibility because the government has not educated the people to not make mistakes. The people have inadequate, incompetent education, so they make mistakes! It is such a fraud.

Prison, dungeons, blessed places where evil is impossible because they are the crossroads of all the evil in the world. One cannot commit evil in hell.

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

On average, drug prisoners spend more time in federal prison than rapists, who often get out on early release because of the overcrowding in prison caused by the Drug War.

There are few better measures of the concern a society has for its individual members and its own well being than the way it handles criminals.

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.

The best situation of all, and one frequently utilized, is for jails and prisons to allow volunteer ministers of all faiths to enter prisons and offer their services to the inmates who want them. That way, the religious needs of inmates are met but without government funds being spent.

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

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

Law is merely the expression of the will of the strongest for the time being, and therefore laws have no fixity, but shift from generation to generation.

He who profits by a crime commits it.

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.

Whatever is worthy to be loved for anything is worthy of preservation. A wise and dispassionate legislator, if any such should ever arise among men, will not condemn to death him who has done or is likely to do more service than injury to society. Blocks and gibbets are the nearest objects with legislators, and their business is never with hopes or with virtues.

Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.

Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.

Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.