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
Most people fancy themselves innocent of those crimes of which they cannot be convicted.
To be at peace in crime! Ah, who can thus flatter himself.
I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.
I was in prison, and you came unto me. Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.
~(Jesus Christ) Matthew 25:36, 40
To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.
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.
Justice renders to every one his due.
There are few better measures of the concern a society has for its individual members and its own well being than the way it handles criminals.
Vices are not crimes.
When it comes to freedom, we are but prisoners of our own desires.
Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X came out of prison stronger.
The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.
Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.
Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.
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.
Nor stony tower, nor walls of beaten brass, Nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron, Can be retentive to the strength of spirit; But life, being weary of these worldly bars, Never lacks power to dismiss itself.
Prison, dungeons, blessed places where evil is impossible because they are the crossroads of all the evil in the world. One cannot commit evil in hell.
Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a God.
No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.
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.
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.
Some laws of state aimed at curbing crime are even more criminal.
Virtue pardons the wicked, as the sandal-tree perfumes the axe which strikes it.
They took away my money, my family, and my security. Why couldn't they destroy my ideas? We will question them in court tomorrow as we trigger The Revolution of all revolutions!