Quotes

To be at peace in crime! Ah, who can thus flatter himself.

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.

As we grow in wisdom, we pardon more freely.

When the Nazis came for the communists, I remained silent; I was not a communist. When they locked up the social democrats, I remained silent; I was not a social democrat. When they came for the trade unionists, I did not speak out; I was not a trade unionist. When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out.

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

Law is merely the expression of the will of the strongest for the time being, and therefore laws have no fixity, but shift from generation to generation.

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.

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.

Women have worked hard; starved in prison; given of their time and lives that we might sit in the House of Commons and take part in the legislating of this country.

I have been studying how I may compare This prison where I live unto the world; And, for because the world is populous, And here is not a creature but myself, I cannot do it. Yet I'll hammer it out.

Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?

How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.

I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up...I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through, before they could get to be as free as I was. I did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar.

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

Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X came out of prison stronger.

Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.

Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.

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.

While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.

The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.

What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor.

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.

In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.

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.