Quotes

The solution to our drug problem is not in incarceration.

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

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!

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

The contagion of crime is like that of the plague. Criminals collected together corrupt each other; they are worse than ever when at the termination of their punishment they re-enter society.

Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.

The world is a prison in which solitary confinement is preferable.

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

One crime is everything; two nothing.

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

In jail a man has no personality. He is a minor disposal problem and a few entries on reports. Nobody cares who loves or hates him, what he looks like, what he did with his life. Nobody reacts to him unless he gives trouble. Nobody abuses him. All that is asked of him is that he go quietly to the right cell and remain quiet when he gets there. There is nothing to fight against, nothing to be mad at. The jailers are quiet men without animosity or sadism.

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.

Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.

Here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to be to restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work.

Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.

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

As we grow in wisdom, we pardon more freely.

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

A country is in a bad state, which is governed only by laws; because a thousand things occur for which laws cannot provide, and where authority ought to interpose.

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

It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.

Well does Heaven have care that no man secures happiness by crime.

To try to raise a son from inside the prison walls is a very difficult thing. But I want to say to the world my son at 16 was the one who tried the most to get me out of prison.
~Jim Bakker

Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrist? And what has he been after that they groan and shake their fists? And wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air? Oh they're taking him to prison for the colour of his hair.