Quotes

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

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

There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.

We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business.

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

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.

The public have more interest in the punishment of an injury than he who receives it.

Society has used the juvenile courts to create a caste system where there are throw-away people.

Whatever is worthy to be loved for anything is worthy of preservation. A wise and dispassionate legislator, if any such should ever arise among men, will not condemn to death him who has done or is likely to do more service than injury to society. Blocks and gibbets are the nearest objects with legislators, and their business is never with hopes or with virtues.

No man should be judge in his own case.

You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.

I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.

The world is a prison in which solitary confinement is preferable.

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.

Federal prison, if you get any of it, you're going to have to do 85% of it. And the reason why I called it that is because I had a friend who got sent to the federal joint and his whole... it wasn't about him being in jail. He cried about the 85%.

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

It is hard, but it is excellent, to find the right knowledge of when correction is necessary and when grace doth most avail.

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

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

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.

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

Whatever you think of de Sade, he was a complex figure and we should not look for easy answers with him. He was, strangely perhaps, against the death penalty, and he was never put in prison for murders or anything like that.

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

A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.

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