Quotes

Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.

It was only when I lay there on the rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not between states nor between social classes nor between political parties, but right through every human heart, through all human hearts. And that is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me, bless you, prison, for having been a part of my life.

Show me the prison, Show me the jail, Show me the prisoner whose life has gone stale. And I'll show you a young man with so many reasons why And there, but for fortune, go you or I.

I existed in a world that never is - the prison of the mind.

Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future lives and crimes to society.

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

Governments have tried to stop crime through punishment throughout the ages, but crime continued in the past punishment remains. Crime can only be stopped through a preventive approach in the schools. You teach the students Transcendental Meditation, and right away they’ll begin using their full brain physiology sensible and they will not get sidetracked into wrong things.

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

Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts.

Justice renders to every one his due.

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.

The solution to our drug problem is not in incarceration.

Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.

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.

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.

Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.

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

Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.

No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, that can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.

On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break.

He who profits by a crime commits it.

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

No crime has been without a precedent.

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

Steal goods and you’ll go to prison, steal lands and you are a king.