When it comes to freedom, we are but prisoners of our own desires.
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.
In jail a man has no personality. He is a minor disposal problem and a few entries on reports. Nobody cares who loves or hates him, what he looks like, what he did with his life. Nobody reacts to him unless he gives trouble. Nobody abuses him. All that is asked of him is that he go quietly to the right cell and remain quiet when he gets there. There is nothing to fight against, nothing to be mad at. The jailers are quiet men without animosity or sadism.
A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards, as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.
History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.
It is hard, but it is excellent, to find the right knowledge of when correction is necessary and when grace doth most avail.
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.
There are few better measures of the concern a society has for its individual members and its own well being than the way it handles criminals.
Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.
Fast closed with double grills And triple gates–the cell To wicked souls is hell; But to a mind that's innocent 'Tis only iron, wood and stone.
So justice while she winks at crimes, Stumbles on innocence sometimes.
Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.
Money will determine whether the accused goes to prison or walks out of the courtroom a free man.
The perfection of a thing consists in its essence; there are perfect criminals, as there are men of perfect probity.
Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.
No crime has been without a precedent.
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.
I can work for the Lord in or out of prison.
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.
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.
There's no greater threat to our independence, to our cherished freedoms and personal liberties than the continual, relentless injection of these insidious poisons into our system. We must decide whether we cherish independence from drugs, without which there is no freedom.
Let us remember that justice must be observed even to the lowest.
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.
A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.
