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
Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.
To be at peace in crime! Ah, who can thus flatter himself.
In my country we go to prison first and then become President.
Shyness is the prison of the heart.
Faults of the head are punished in this world, those of the heart in another; but as most of our vices are compound, so also is their punishment.
If you strike at, imprison, or kill us, out of our prisons or graves we will still evoke a spirit that will thwart you, and perhaps, raise a force that will destroy you! We defy you! Do your worst!
The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.
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.
The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.
No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business.
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.
It was only when I lay there on the rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not between states nor between social classes nor between political parties, but right through every human heart, through all human hearts. And that is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me, bless you, prison, for having been a part of my life.
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.
No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, that can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.
Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?
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 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.
It is not at the table, but in prison, that you learn who your true friends are.
I don't like being famous - it is like a prison. And driving for Ferrari would make it far worse.
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.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.
If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.
