Quotes

Man is condemned to be free.

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

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

It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

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

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

What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.

Virtue pardons the wicked, as the sandal-tree perfumes the axe which strikes it.

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.

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

I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up...I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through, before they could get to be as free as I was. I did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar.

If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.

Women now have choices. They can be married, not married, have a job, not have a job, be married with children, unmarried with children. Men have the same choice we've always had: work, or prison.

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.

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.

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

One crime has to be concealed by another.

Well does Heaven have care that no man secures happiness by crime.

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

I know not whether laws be right, or whether laws be wrong; All that we know who lie in gaol is that the wall is strong; And that each day is like a year, a year whose days are long.

The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They keep returning to the same things.

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.

Experts and the educated elite have replaced what worked with what sounded good. Society was far more civilized before they took over our schools, prisons, welfare programs, police departments and courts. It's high time we ran these people out of our lives and went back to common sense.