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.
I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.
Here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to be to restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work.
Crime is a logical extension of the sort of behavior that often [is] considered perfectly respectable in legitimate business.
Society has used the juvenile courts to create a caste system where there are throw-away people.
~James Bell
Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.
Self is the only prison that can bind the soul.
The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.
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.
We shall fight against them, throw them in prisons and destroy them.
Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
If it's near dinner-time, the foreman takes out his watch when the jury has retired, and says: "Dear me, gentlemen, ten minutes to five, I declare! I dine at five, gentlemen." "So do I," says everybody else, except two men who ought to have dined at three and seem more than half disposed to stand out in consequence. The foreman smiles, and puts up his watch:--"Well, gentlemen, what do we say, plaintiff or defendant, gentlemen?
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.
The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.
He who opens a school door, closes a prison.
You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.
Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.
Body is a home, a prison and a grave.
Forgiveness, that noblest of all self-denial, is a virtue which he alone who can practise in himself can willingly believe in another.
When you are younger you get blamed for crimes you never committed and when you're older you begin to get credit for virtues you never possessed. It evens itself out.
Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrist? And what has he been after that they groan and shake their fists? And wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air? Oh they're taking him to prison for the colour of his hair.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
Vices are not crimes.
Pardon is the virtue of victory.
