Trial by jury itself, instead of being a security to persons who are accused, shall be a delusion, a mockery, and a snare.
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.
If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.
In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.
In jail a man has no personality. He is a minor disposal problem and a few entries on reports. Nobody cares who loves or hates him, what he looks like, what he did with his life. Nobody reacts to him unless he gives trouble. Nobody abuses him. All that is asked of him is that he go quietly to the right cell and remain quiet when he gets there. There is nothing to fight against, nothing to be mad at. The jailers are quiet men without animosity or sadism.
When it comes to freedom, we are but prisoners of our own desires.
Concepts of justice must have hands and feet to carry out justice in every case in the shortest possible time and the lowest possible cost. That is the challenge to every lawyer and judge in America.
There are dreadful punishments enacted against thieves; but it were much better to make such good provisions, by which every man might be put in a method how to live, and so to be preserved from the fatal necessity of stealing and dying for it.
A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.
Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.
One man meets an infamous punishment for that crime which confers a diadem upon another.
I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.
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
Here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to be to restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work.
The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
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 have been studying how I may compare this prison where I live unto the world; Shut up in the prison of their own consciences.
Adversities such as being homeless and going to prison has made many people stronger.
One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
No man should be judge in his own case.
Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.
If you share the crime of your friend, you make it your own.
Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.
