It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.
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.
He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it.
It is impossible to go through life without trust: That is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.
If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.
History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.
I sometimes wish that people would put a little more emphasis upon the observance of the law than they do upon its enforcement.
America is the land of the second chance – and when the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life.
We are prisoners of ideas.
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.
The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.
The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.
As we grow in wisdom, we pardon more freely.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
They took away my money, my family, and my security. Why couldn't they destroy my ideas? We will question them in court tomorrow as we trigger The Revolution of all revolutions!
In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.
Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.
Forgiveness, that noblest of all self-denial, is a virtue which he alone who can practise in himself can willingly believe in another.
It is true you cannot eat freedom and you cannot power machinery with democracy. But then neither can political prisoners turn on the light in the cells of a dictatorship.
Law is merely the expression of the will of the strongest for the time being, and therefore laws have no fixity, but shift from generation to generation.
Wicked deeds are generally done, even with impunity, for the mere desire of occupation.
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 mellow sweetness of pumpkin pie off a prison spoon is something you will never forget.
To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.
Most people fancy themselves innocent of those crimes of which they cannot be convicted.
