Quotes

Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.

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

Justice renders to every one his due.

If you share the crime of your friend, you make it your own.

The world itself is but a large prison, out of which some are daily led to execution.

To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.

If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.

Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.

On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break.

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

Three hundred years ago a prisoner condemned to the Tower of London carved on the wall of his cell this sentiment to keep up his spirits during his long imprisonment: “It is not adversity that kills, but the impatience with which we bear adversity.”

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.

He who opens a school door, closes a prison.

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.

When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.

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

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.

I just remember that disturbing feeling of walking into that prison, the complete loss of privacy, the complete loss of stimulation, dignity.

The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They keep returning to the same things.

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.

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.

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.

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

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