Quotes

When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.

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.

We shall fight against them, throw them in prisons and destroy them.

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.

The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.

Reality becomes a prison to those who can’t get out of it.

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.

In my country we go to prison first and then become President.

The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.

Well does Heaven have care that no man secures happiness by crime.

Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X came out of prison stronger.

We are prisoners of ideas.

Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.

Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.

The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.

The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.

There are few better measures of the concern a society has for its individual members and its own well being than the way it handles criminals.

It is not at the table, but in prison, that you learn who your true friends are.

The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.

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.

If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.

I am an expert of electricity. My father occupied the chair of applied electricity at the state prison.

Prison makes you a better judge of character. You pick up on people much faster.

Money will determine whether the accused goes to prison or walks out of the courtroom a free man.

While crime is punished it yet increases.