Quotes

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.

When you are younger you get blamed for crimes you never committed and when you're older you begin to get credit for virtues you never possessed. It evens itself out.

When the Nazis came for the communists, I remained silent; I was not a communist. When they locked up the social democrats, I remained silent; I was not a social democrat. When they came for the trade unionists, I did not speak out; I was not a trade unionist. When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out.

I have been studying how I may compare this prison where I live unto the world; Shut up in the prison of their own consciences.

Governments have tried to stop crime through punishment throughout the ages, but crime continued in the past punishment remains. Crime can only be stopped through a preventive approach in the schools. You teach the students Transcendental Meditation, and right away they’ll begin using their full brain physiology sensible and they will not get sidetracked into wrong things.

Crime succeeds by sudden despatch; honest counsels gain vigor by delay.

The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.

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

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

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

If two people fight on the street, whose fault is it? Who is the criminal? It is the government’s responsibility because the government has not educated the people to not make mistakes. The people have inadequate, incompetent education, so they make mistakes! It is such a fraud.

One crime is everything; two nothing.

The world itself is but a large prison, out of which some are daily led to execution.

It is safer that a bad man should not be accused, than that he should be acquitted.

The perfection of a thing consists in its essence; there are perfect criminals, as there are men of perfect probity.

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

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

Before we can diminish our sufferings from the ill-controlled aggressive assaults of fellow citizens, we must renounce the philosophy of punishment, the obsolete, vengeful penal attitude. In its place we would seek a comprehensive, constructive social attitude - therapeutic in some instances, restraining in some instances, but preventive in its total social impact. In the last analysis this becomes a question of personal morals and values. No matter how glorified or how piously disguised, vengeance as a human motive must be personally repudiated by each and every one of us.

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

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

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.

The contagion of crime is like that of the plague. Criminals collected together corrupt each other; they are worse than ever when at the termination of their punishment they re-enter society.

There is no peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war - at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.

Adversities such as being homeless and going to prison has made many people stronger.

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