Quotes

Man is condemned to be free.

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.

Extreme justice is extreme injustice.

I don't like being famous - it is like a prison. And driving for Ferrari would make it far worse.

Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilization.

Do not lay on the multitude the blame that is due to a few.

The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.

Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.

A variety in punishment is of utility, as well as a proportion.

Three hundred years ago a prisoner condemned to the Tower of London carved on the wall of his cell this sentiment to keep up his spirits during his long imprisonment: “It is not adversity that kills, but the impatience with which we bear adversity.”

It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.

Any punishment that does not correct, that can merely rouse rebellion in whoever has to endure it, is a piece of gratuitous infamy which makes those who impose it more guilty in the eyes of humanity, good sense and reason, nay a hundred times more guilty than the victim on whom the punishment is inflicted.

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

The number of laws is constantly growing in all countries and, owing to this, what is called crime is very often not a crime at all, for it contains no element of violence or harm.

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

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.

Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.

No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.

Every crime has, in the moment of its perpetration, Its own avenging angel--dark misgiving, An ominous sinking at the inmost heart.

The mellow sweetness of pumpkin pie off a prison spoon is something you will never forget.

I never told a victim story about my imprisonment. Instead, I told a transformation story - about how prison changed my outlook, about how I saw that communication, truth, and trust are at the heart of power.

He who profits by a crime commits it.

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

In my country we go to prison first and then become President.

Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.