Quotes

Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a God.

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

No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.

Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.

Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future lives and crimes to society.

No crime has been without a precedent.

One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.

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.

The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business.

Forgiveness, that noblest of all self-denial, is a virtue which he alone who can practise in himself can willingly believe in another.

In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.

By noiselessly going to a prison a civil-resister ensures a calm atmosphere.

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

Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.

The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.

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

Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.

Man is condemned to be free.

Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.

The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.

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

The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.

While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.

He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it.