Quotes

No crime has been without a precedent.

While crime is punished it yet increases.

If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.

Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.

A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.

It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.

So justice while she winks at crimes, Stumbles on innocence sometimes.

Before we can diminish our sufferings from the ill-controlled aggressive assaults of fellow citizens, we must renounce the philosophy of punishment, the obsolete, vengeful penal attitude. In its place we would seek a comprehensive, constructive social attitude - therapeutic in some instances, restraining in some instances, but preventive in its total social impact. In the last analysis this becomes a question of personal morals and values. No matter how glorified or how piously disguised, vengeance as a human motive must be personally repudiated by each and every one of us.

Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our duty is to furnish it well.

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.

Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.

It is hard, but it is excellent, to find the right knowledge of when correction is necessary and when grace doth most avail.

Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them.

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

I just remember that disturbing feeling of walking into that prison, the complete loss of privacy, the complete loss of stimulation, dignity.

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 judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.

You utter a vow, or forge a signature, and you may find yourself bound for life to a monastery, a woman, or prison.

Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.

No man should be judge in his own case.

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.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.

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

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%.