Extreme justice is extreme injustice.
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.
Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.
Crime succeeds by sudden despatch; honest counsels gain vigor by delay.
It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.
He who opens a school door, closes a prison.
I have never been contained except I made the prison.
There is a point at which even justice does injury.
You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.
Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.
We have our own system, ... and journalists in our system are not put in prison for embarrassing the government by revealing things the government might not wish to have revealed. The important thing is that our system, under which journalists can write without fear or favor, should continue.
Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our duty is to furnish it well.
Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.
Forgiveness, that noblest of all self-denial, is a virtue which he alone who can practise in himself can willingly believe in another.
The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.
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
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.
The uneven impact of actual enforcement measures tends to mirror and reinforce more general patterns of discrimination (along socioeconomic, racial and ethnic, sexual, and perhaps generational lines) within the society. As a consequence, such enforcement (ineffective as it may be in producing conformity) almost certainly reinforces feelings of alienation already prevalent within major segments of the population.
A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.
America is the land of the second chance – and when the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life.
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.
When it comes to freedom, we are but prisoners of our own desires.
It is safer that a bad man should not be accused, than that he should be acquitted.
Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.
The only effect of public punishment is to show the rabble how bravely it can be borne; and that every one who hath lost a toe-nail hath suffered worse.
