Quotes

In prison, you get the chance to see who really loves you.

Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.

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

Before we can diminish our sufferings from the ill-controlled aggressive assaults of fellow citizens, we must renounce the philosophy of punishment, the obsolete, vengeful penal attitude. In its place we would seek a comprehensive, constructive social attitude - therapeutic in some instances, restraining in some instances, but preventive in its total social impact. In the last analysis this becomes a question of personal morals and values. No matter how glorified or how piously disguised, vengeance as a human motive must be personally repudiated by each and every one of us.

Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our duty is to furnish it well.

History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.

Reality becomes a prison to those who can’t get out of it.

Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.

Let us remember that justice must be observed even to the lowest.

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.

Shyness is the prison of the heart.

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.

It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.

In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.

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.

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.

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.

Justice renders to every one his due.

I can tell you this on a stack of Bibles: prisons are archaic, brutal, unregenerative, overcrowded hell holes where the inmates are treated like animals with absolutely not one humane thought given to what they are going to do once they are released. You're an animal in a cage and you're treated like one.

Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached.

Any punishment that does not correct, that can merely rouse rebellion in whoever has to endure it, is a piece of gratuitous infamy which makes those who impose it more guilty in the eyes of humanity, good sense and reason, nay a hundred times more guilty than the victim on whom the punishment is inflicted.

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 am an expert of electricity. My father occupied the chair of applied electricity at the state prison.

Women have worked hard; starved in prison; given of their time and lives that we might sit in the House of Commons and take part in the legislating of this country.