In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
The best situation of all, and one frequently utilized, is for jails and prisons to allow volunteer ministers of all faiths to enter prisons and offer their services to the inmates who want them. That way, the religious needs of inmates are met but without government funds being spent.
It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.
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.
One of the problems that the marijuana reform movement consistently faces is that everyone wants to talk about what marijuana does, but no one ever wants to look at what marijuana prohibition does. Marijuana never kicks down your door in the middle of the night. Marijuana never locks up sick and dying people, does not suppress medical research, does not peek in bedroom windows.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
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.
Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.
The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.
To trial bring her stolen charms, and let her prison be my arms.
Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.
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.
I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice.
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.
Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached.
Self is the only prison that can bind the soul.
Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X came out of prison stronger.
Some laws of state aimed at curbing crime are even more criminal.
Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.
Adversities such as being homeless and going to prison has made many people stronger.
I have never been contained except I made the prison.
So justice while she winks at crimes, Stumbles on innocence sometimes.
One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.
