We are prisoners of ideas.
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
One man meets an infamous punishment for that crime which confers a diadem upon another.
On average, drug prisoners spend more time in federal prison than rapists, who often get out on early release because of the overcrowding in prison caused by the Drug War.
Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.
The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.
The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.
The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.
The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.
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.
The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.
Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.
Crime succeeds by sudden despatch; honest counsels gain vigor by delay.
The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.
The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.
No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, that can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.
The torment of human frustration, whatever its immediate cause, is the knowledge that the self is in prison, its vital force and 'mangled mind' leaking away in lonely, wasteful self-conflict.
It is true you cannot eat freedom and you cannot power machinery with democracy. But then neither can political prisoners turn on the light in the cells of a dictatorship.
One crime has to be concealed by another.
Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilization.
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.
Man is condemned to be free.
Vices are not crimes.
