Quotes

The only difference between me and my fellow actors is that I've spent more time in jail.

Crime is a logical extension of the sort of behavior that often [is] considered perfectly respectable in legitimate business.

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

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

He who opens a school door, closes a prison.

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

Care should be taken that the punishment does not exceed the guilt; and also that some men do not suffer for offenses for which others are not even indicted.

I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.

It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their own kind.

One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.

The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.

He had drawn many a thousand of these rations in prisons and camps, and though he'd never had an opportunity to weight them on scales, and although, being a man of timid nature, he knew no way of standing up for his rights, he, like every other prisoner, had discovered long ago that honest weight was never to be found in the bread-cutting. There was short weight in every ration. The only point was how short. So every day you took a look to soothe your soul - today, maybe, they haven't snitched any.

The torment of human frustration, whatever its immediate cause, is the knowledge that the self is in prison, its vital force and 'mangled mind' leaking away in lonely, wasteful self-conflict.

Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.

It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.

There is no peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war - at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.

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.

Trial by jury itself, instead of being a security to persons who are accused, shall be a delusion, a mockery, and a snare.

I was in prison, and you came unto me. Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.
~(Jesus Christ) Matthew 25:36, 40

I sometimes wish that people would put a little more emphasis upon the observance of the law than they do upon its enforcement.

No man should be judge in his own case.

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.

Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.