Quotes

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.

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.

The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.

I sometimes wish that people would put a little more emphasis upon the observance of the law than they do upon its enforcement.

Women now have choices. They can be married, not married, have a job, not have a job, be married with children, unmarried with children. Men have the same choice we've always had: work, or prison.

There is a point at which even justice does injury.

Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.

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!

We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business.

The only effect of public punishment is to show the rabble how bravely it can be borne; and that every one who hath lost a toe-nail hath suffered worse.

As we grow in wisdom, we pardon more freely.

Whatever you think of de Sade, he was a complex figure and we should not look for easy answers with him. He was, strangely perhaps, against the death penalty, and he was never put in prison for murders or anything like that.

The severest justice may not always be the best policy.

He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it.

I have been studying how I may compare This prison where I live unto the world; And, for because the world is populous, And here is not a creature but myself, I cannot do it. Yet I'll hammer it out.

What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor.

He who opens a school door, closes a prison.

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.

No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.

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

Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.

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.

Virtue pardons the wicked, as the sandal-tree perfumes the axe which strikes it.

The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose 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.