Quotes

The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business.

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.

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.

A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.

The perfection of a thing consists in its essence; there are perfect criminals, as there are men of perfect probity.

Money will determine whether the accused goes to prison or walks out of the courtroom a free man.

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.

Wherever any one is against his will, that is to him a prison.

Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.

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.

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

Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.

Man is condemned to be free.

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.

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

Taught from infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.

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.

Society has used the juvenile courts to create a caste system where there are throw-away people.

A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.

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

If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.

In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.

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

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