If we look at Houston, which is a very environmentally toxic place, we find that it has one of the highest levels of young men going to prison and also among the highest levels of illiteracy in the country.
Trial by jury itself, instead of being a security to persons who are accused, shall be a delusion, a mockery, and a snare.
Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
A man who has no excuse for a crime, is indeed defenseless!
The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.
We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business.
A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.
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.”
Virtue pardons the wicked, as the sandal-tree perfumes the axe which strikes it.
Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.
And while God had work for Paul, he found him friends both in court and prison. Let persecutors send saints to prison, God can provide a keeper for their turn.
A country is in a bad state, which is governed only by laws; because a thousand things occur for which laws cannot provide, and where authority ought to interpose.
It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.
Do not lay on the multitude the blame that is due to a few.
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.
In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.
I can work for the Lord in or out of prison.
To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.
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.
I was put into jail as I was going to the shoemaker's to get a shoe which was mended. When I was let out the next morning, I proceeded to finish my errand, and, having put on my mended shoe, joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct; and in half an hour -- for the horse was soon tackled -- was in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off, and then the State was nowhere to be seen.
The mellow sweetness of pumpkin pie off a prison spoon is something you will never forget.
Some laws of state aimed at curbing crime are even more criminal.
I know not whether laws be right, or whether laws be wrong; All that we know who lie in gaol is that the wall is strong; And that each day is like a year, a year whose days are long.
Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.
