Quotes

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

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.

One crime is everything; two nothing.

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

Body is a home, a prison and a grave.

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

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

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

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.

The uneven impact of actual enforcement measures tends to mirror and reinforce more general patterns of discrimination (along socioeconomic, racial and ethnic, sexual, and perhaps generational lines) within the society. As a consequence, such enforcement (ineffective as it may be in producing conformity) almost certainly reinforces feelings of alienation already prevalent within major segments of the population.

Taught from infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.

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

Any punishment that does not correct, that can merely rouse rebellion in whoever has to endure it, is a piece of gratuitous infamy which makes those who impose it more guilty in the eyes of humanity, good sense and reason, nay a hundred times more guilty than the victim on whom the punishment is inflicted.

Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.

While crime is punished it yet increases.

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.

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.

Reality becomes a prison to those who can’t get out of it.

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.

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

Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.

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.

I never told a victim story about my imprisonment. Instead, I told a transformation story - about how prison changed my outlook, about how I saw that communication, truth, and trust are at the heart of power.

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

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.