It is certain that the study of human psychology, if it were undertaken exclusively in prisons, would also lead to misrepresentation and absurd generalizations.
To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.
To seek the redress of grievances by going to law, is like sheep running for shelter to a bramble bush.
It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.
The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.
I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up...I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through, before they could get to be as free as I was.
History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.
No man survives when freedom fails. The best men rot in filthy jails, and those who cry 'appease, appease' are hanged by those they tried to please.
So justice while she winks at crimes, Stumbles on innocence sometimes.
There are dreadful punishments enacted against thieves; but it were much better to make such good provisions, by which every man might be put in a method how to live, and so to be preserved from the fatal necessity of stealing and dying for it.
The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.
Three hundred years ago a prisoner condemned to the Tower of London carved on the wall of his cell this sentiment to keep up his spirits during his long imprisonment: “It is not adversity that kills, but the impatience with which we bear adversity.”
The difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion is the thickness of a prison walls.
Prosecution I have managed to avoid; but I have been arrested, charged in a police court, have refused to be bound over, and thereupon have been unconditionally released - to my great regret; for I have always wanted to know what going to prison was like.
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.
If you share the crime of your friend, you make it your own.
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 want total security, go to prison. There you’re fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking…is freedom.
You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.
Trial by jury itself, instead of being a security to persons who are accused, shall be a delusion, a mockery, and a snare.
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
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.
The only difference between me and my fellow actors is that I've spent more time in jail.
If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.
They're not supposed to show prison films in prison. Especially ones that are about escaping.
