Jails Quotes

Every friend of freedom must be as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the United States into an armed camp, by the vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence.

The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education.

I've been speaking at churches for years, as well as juvenile jails, rehabs and hospitals, and I always talk about my faith. That is a declaration of my relationship with God.

My brother Jim and I saw our father go into the jails and pray with the inmates Sunday after Sunday. He prayed with both blacks and whites. If we ever repeated any slurs we heard on the playground, he'd tell us very softly, "I don't want to hear those words."

Addiction should never be treated as a crime. It has to be treated as a health problem. We do not send alcoholics to jail in this country. Over 500,000 people are in our jails who are nonviolent drug users.

At Kansas City, Kansas, before the saloons were closed, they were getting ready to build an addition to the jail. Now the doors swing idly on the hinges and there is nobody to lock in the jails.

If a dad does his job, we don't need prisons, we don't need jails. That's what I saw growing up.

Of course it can be said of jails, too, that they try - by punishing the troublesome - to deter others. No doubt, in certain instances this deterrence actually works. But generally speaking it fails conspicuously.

Where is the justice of political power if it executes the murderer and jails the plunderer, and then itself marches upon neighboring lands, killing thousands and pillaging the very hills?

Jails and prisons are designed to break human beings, to convert the population into specimens in a zoo - obedient to our keepers, but dangerous to each other.

Jails and prisons are the complement of schools; so many less as you have of the latter, so many more must you have of the former.

But the single overwhelming reason why jails are bursting is longer sentences given for more crimes.

There are not enough jails, not enough police, not enough courts to enforce a law not supported by the people.