Quotes

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

I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.

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.

Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.

I can work for the Lord in or out of prison.

Experts and the educated elite have replaced what worked with what sounded good. Society was far more civilized before they took over our schools, prisons, welfare programs, police departments and courts. It's high time we ran these people out of our lives and went back to common sense.

When it comes to freedom, we are but prisoners of our own desires.

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

Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.

Some laws of state aimed at curbing crime are even more criminal.

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

I existed in a world that never is - the prison of the mind.

If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.

In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.

Concepts of justice must have hands and feet to carry out justice in every case in the shortest possible time and the lowest possible cost. That is the challenge to every lawyer and judge in America.

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.

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.

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

Women have worked hard; starved in prison; given of their time and lives that we might sit in the House of Commons and take part in the legislating of this country.

No man should be judge in his own case.

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

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

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

Pardon is the virtue of victory.

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