Quotes

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.

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.

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

Crime is a logical extension of the sort of behavior that often [is] considered perfectly respectable in legitimate business.

The solution to our drug problem is not in incarceration.

He was a first-time nonviolent possible offender, ... And under the mandatory minimums, he was put in prison for 15 years. Not only does the punishment not fit the crime, but the mandatory minimums don't give judges any discretion to look at the background of the case, to read into the specifics of the case. I don't know a judge who really is in favor of the mandatory minimums.

Extreme justice is extreme injustice.

In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.

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

Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.

They were being driven to a prison, through no fault of their own, in all probability for life. In comparison, how much easier it would be to walk to the gallows than to this tomb of living horrors!

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

Justice renders to every one his due.

In my country we go to prison first and then become President.

To seek the redress of grievances by going to law, is like sheep running for shelter to a bramble bush.

How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.

Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.

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

One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.

We have our own system, ... and journalists in our system are not put in prison for embarrassing the government by revealing things the government might not wish to have revealed. The important thing is that our system, under which journalists can write without fear or favor, should continue.

If it's near dinner-time, the foreman takes out his watch when the jury has retired, and says: "Dear me, gentlemen, ten minutes to five, I declare! I dine at five, gentlemen." "So do I," says everybody else, except two men who ought to have dined at three and seem more than half disposed to stand out in consequence. The foreman smiles, and puts up his watch:--"Well, gentlemen, what do we say, plaintiff or defendant, gentlemen?

A sick person is a prisoner.

Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.

One man meets an infamous punishment for that crime which confers a diadem upon another.

The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.