Quotes

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

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

I know not whether laws be right, or whether laws be wrong; All that we know who lie in gaol is that the wall is strong; And that each day is like a year, a year whose days are long.

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

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

Trial by jury itself, instead of being a security to persons who are accused, shall be a delusion, a mockery, and a snare.

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

Wherever any one is against his will, that is to him a prison.

If we look at Houston, which is a very environmentally toxic place, we find that it has one of the highest levels of young men going to prison and also among the highest levels of illiteracy in the country.

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 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 have never been contained except I made the prison.

Written laws are like spiders' webs, and will, like them, only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful will easily break through them.

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.

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.

It is not at the table, but in prison, that you learn who your true friends are.

One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.

He had drawn many a thousand of these rations in prisons and camps, and though he'd never had an opportunity to weight them on scales, and although, being a man of timid nature, he knew no way of standing up for his rights, he, like every other prisoner, had discovered long ago that honest weight was never to be found in the bread-cutting. There was short weight in every ration. The only point was how short. So every day you took a look to soothe your soul - today, maybe, they haven't snitched any.

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

We're in a war. People who blast some pot on a casual basis are guilty of treason.

To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.

I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.

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

Crime is a logical extension of the sort of behavior that often [is] considered perfectly respectable in legitimate business.

We shall fight against them, throw them in prisons and destroy them.