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.
There's no greater threat to our independence, to our cherished freedoms and personal liberties than the continual, relentless injection of these insidious poisons into our system. We must decide whether we cherish independence from drugs, without which there is no freedom.
The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.
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.
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.
Trial by jury itself, instead of being a security to persons who are accused, shall be a delusion, a mockery, and a snare.
I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.
We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business.
So justice while she winks at crimes, Stumbles on innocence sometimes.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
Body is a home, a prison and a grave.
The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
We who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments.
To be at peace in crime! Ah, who can thus flatter himself.
The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.
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.
Here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to be to restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work.
We shall not yield to violence. We shall not be deprived of union freedoms. We shall never agree with sending people to prison for their convictions.
A country is in a bad state, which is governed only by laws; because a thousand things occur for which laws cannot provide, and where authority ought to interpose.
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.
The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.
The mellow sweetness of pumpkin pie off a prison spoon is something you will never forget.
In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.
In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
It is not at the table, but in prison, that you learn who your true friends are.
