If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.
To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.
Extreme justice is extreme injustice.
Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.
Nor stony tower, nor walls of beaten brass, Nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron, Can be retentive to the strength of spirit; But life, being weary of these worldly bars, Never lacks power to dismiss itself.
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.
I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.
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 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.
I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.
The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
Self is the only prison that can bind the soul.
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.
I can work for the Lord in or out of prison.
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.
As we grow in wisdom, we pardon more freely.
If you share the crime of your friend, you make it your own.
Forgiveness, that noblest of all self-denial, is a virtue which he alone who can practise in himself can willingly believe in another.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
The perfection of a thing consists in its essence; there are perfect criminals, as there are men of perfect probity.
Written laws are like spiders' webs, and will, like them, only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful will easily break through them.
To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.
By noiselessly going to a prison a civil-resister ensures a calm atmosphere.
