Quotes

If you strike at, imprison, or kill us, out of our prisons or graves we will still evoke a spirit that will thwart you, and perhaps, raise a force that will destroy you! We defy you! Do your worst!

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

In prison, you get the chance to see who really loves you.

The only effect of public punishment is to show the rabble how bravely it can be borne; and that every one who hath lost a toe-nail hath suffered worse.

The best situation of all, and one frequently utilized, is for jails and prisons to allow volunteer ministers of all faiths to enter prisons and offer their services to the inmates who want them. That way, the religious needs of inmates are met but without government funds being spent.

I sometimes wish that people would put a little more emphasis upon the observance of the law than they do upon its enforcement.

Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached.

And while God had work for Paul, he found him friends both in court and prison. Let persecutors send saints to prison, God can provide a keeper for their turn.

Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.

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

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.

A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.

There are dreadful punishments enacted against thieves; but it were much better to make such good provisions, by which every man might be put in a method how to live, and so to be preserved from the fatal necessity of stealing and dying for it.

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

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

Justice renders to every one his due.

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

The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.

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

The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.

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

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

Virtue pardons the wicked, as the sandal-tree perfumes the axe which strikes it.

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

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.