Quotes

There is a point at which even justice does injury.

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.

When it comes to freedom, we are but prisoners of our own desires.

The uneven impact of actual enforcement measures tends to mirror and reinforce more general patterns of discrimination (along socioeconomic, racial and ethnic, sexual, and perhaps generational lines) within the society. As a consequence, such enforcement (ineffective as it may be in producing conformity) almost certainly reinforces feelings of alienation already prevalent within major segments of the population.

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

Organized crime in America takes in over forty billion dollars a year. This is quite a profitable sum, especially when one considers that the Mafia spends very little for office supplies.

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

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

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

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

America is the land of the second chance – and when the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life.

Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.

Whatever you think of de Sade, he was a complex figure and we should not look for easy answers with him. He was, strangely perhaps, against the death penalty, and he was never put in prison for murders or anything like that.

I just remember that disturbing feeling of walking into that prison, the complete loss of privacy, the complete loss of stimulation, dignity.

A sick person is a prisoner.

If you strike at, imprison, or kill us, out of our prisons or graves we will still evoke a spirit that will thwart you, and perhaps, raise a force that will destroy you! We defy you! Do your worst!

It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.

We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business.

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

One crime has to be concealed by another.

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

Before we can diminish our sufferings from the ill-controlled aggressive assaults of fellow citizens, we must renounce the philosophy of punishment, the obsolete, vengeful penal attitude. In its place we would seek a comprehensive, constructive social attitude - therapeutic in some instances, restraining in some instances, but preventive in its total social impact. In the last analysis this becomes a question of personal morals and values. No matter how glorified or how piously disguised, vengeance as a human motive must be personally repudiated by each and every one of us.

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

Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.

Fast closed with double grills
And triple gates – the cell
To wicked souls is hell;
But to a mind that's innocent
'Tis only iron, wood and stone.