Quotes

It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.

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

Some laws of state aimed at curbing crime are even more criminal.

The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.

It is safer that a bad man should not be accused, than that he should be acquitted.

He who opens a school door, closes a prison.

The best situation of all, and one frequently utilized, is for jails and prisons to allow volunteer ministers of all faiths to enter prisons and offer their services to the inmates who want them. That way, the religious needs of inmates are met but without government funds being spent.

No man survives when freedom fails. The best men rot in filthy jails, and those who cry 'appease, appease' are hanged by those they tried to please.

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.

A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.

One man meets an infamous punishment for that crime which confers a diadem upon another.

The solution to our drug problem is not in incarceration.

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.

I have been studying how I may compare this prison where I live unto the world; Shut up in the prison of their own consciences.

Society has used the juvenile courts to create a caste system where there are throw-away people.

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

Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.

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

The world is a prison in which solitary confinement is preferable.

Hanging was the worst use a man could be put to.

Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.

Nor stony tower, nor walls of beaten brass, Nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron, Can be retentive to the strength of spirit; But life, being weary of these worldly bars, Never lacks power to dismiss itself.

A man who has no excuse for a crime, is indeed defenseless!

In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.

Written laws are like spiders' webs, and will, like them, only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful will easily break through them.