Quotes

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.

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.

How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.

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.

The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.

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.

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

The mellow sweetness of pumpkin pie off a prison spoon is something you will never forget.

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.

Man is condemned to be free.

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

He had drawn many a thousand of these rations in prisons and camps, and though he'd never had an opportunity to weight them on scales, and although, being a man of timid nature, he knew no way of standing up for his rights, he, like every other prisoner, had discovered long ago that honest weight was never to be found in the bread-cutting. There was short weight in every ration. The only point was how short. So every day you took a look to soothe your soul - today, maybe, they haven't snitched any.

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

The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.

Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.

Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts.

Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our duty is to furnish it well.

The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.

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

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

The difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion is the thickness of a prison walls.

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.

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.

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

Crimes generally punish themselves.