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 never told a victim story about my imprisonment. Instead, I told a transformation story - about how prison changed my outlook, about how I saw that communication, truth, and trust are at the heart of power.
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.
No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, that can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.
I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky.
I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.
Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?
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.
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.
One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.
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.
There is no peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war - at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.
To be at peace in crime! Ah, who can thus flatter himself.
Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.
You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.
The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.
Steal goods and you’ll go to prison, steal lands and you are a king.
What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor.
Some laws of state aimed at curbing crime are even more criminal.
Money will determine whether the accused goes to prison or walks out of the courtroom a free man.
What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.
We shall fight against them, throw them in prisons and destroy them.
It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their own kind.
Federal prison, if you get any of it, you're going to have to do 85% of it. And the reason why I called it that is because I had a friend who got sent to the federal joint and his whole... it wasn't about him being in jail. He cried about the 85%.
