Quotes

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 guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.

Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.

I sometimes wish that people would put a little more emphasis upon the observance of the law than they do upon its enforcement.

History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.

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.

Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.

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

The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.

When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.

Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.

Care should be taken that the punishment does not exceed the guilt; and also that some men do not suffer for offenses for which others are not even indicted.

I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.

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

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.

Faults of the head are punished in this world, those of the heart in another; but as most of our vices are compound, so also is their punishment.

It is certain that the study of human psychology, if it were undertaken exclusively in prisons, would also lead to misrepresentation and absurd generalizations.

Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts.

Self is the only prison that can bind the soul.

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.

When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.

By noiselessly going to a prison a civil-resister ensures a calm atmosphere.

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.

Since 1957, black people have experienced double-digit unemployment - in good times and bad times. Look at the population of African Americans in prison. They represent more than half the population of prisoners in the country, 55 percent of those on death row.

It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their own kind.