Quotes

It is true you cannot eat freedom and you cannot power machinery with democracy. But then neither can political prisoners turn on the light in the cells of a dictatorship.

Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.

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

I can work for the Lord in or out of prison.

If you share the crime of your friend, you make it your own.

As we grow in wisdom, we pardon more freely.

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

There are dreadful punishments enacted against thieves; but it were much better to make such good provisions, by which every man might be put in a method how to live, and so to be preserved from the fatal necessity of stealing and dying for it.

He was a first-time nonviolent possible offender, ... And under the mandatory minimums, he was put in prison for 15 years. Not only does the punishment not fit the crime, but the mandatory minimums don't give judges any discretion to look at the background of the case, to read into the specifics of the case. I don't know a judge who really is in favor of the mandatory minimums.

If we look at Houston, which is a very environmentally toxic place, we find that it has one of the highest levels of young men going to prison and also among the highest levels of illiteracy in the country.

In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.

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

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

I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.

It is impossible to go through life without trust: That is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.

You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.

They're not supposed to show prison films in prison. Especially ones that are about escaping.

The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.

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

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.

Crime succeeds by sudden despatch; honest counsels gain vigor by delay.

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

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

Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.

A sick person is a prisoner.