We are prisoners of ideas.
You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.
On average, drug prisoners spend more time in federal prison than rapists, who often get out on early release because of the overcrowding in prison caused by the Drug War.
Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts.
Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them.
It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.
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.
One of the problems that the marijuana reform movement consistently faces is that everyone wants to talk about what marijuana does, but no one ever wants to look at what marijuana prohibition does. Marijuana never kicks down your door in the middle of the night. Marijuana never locks up sick and dying people, does not suppress medical research, does not peek in bedroom windows.
Any punishment that does not correct, that can merely rouse rebellion in whoever has to endure it, is a piece of gratuitous infamy which makes those who impose it more guilty in the eyes of humanity, good sense and reason, nay a hundred times more guilty than the victim on whom the punishment is inflicted.
There is a point at which even justice does injury.
Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.
I just remember that disturbing feeling of walking into that prison, the complete loss of privacy, the complete loss of stimulation, dignity.
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.
When it comes to freedom, we are but prisoners of our own desires.
You utter a vow, or forge a signature, and you may find yourself bound for life to a monastery, a woman, or prison.
Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.
Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.
Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a God.
A man who has no excuse for a crime, is indeed defenseless!
Fear can be like a prison. It is, however, a self made prison. Many are imprisoned by fear. No one else can liberate them from this prison. Others may inspire them but they must liberate themselves.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
While crime is punished it yet increases.
I have been studying how I may compare this prison where I live unto the world; Shut up in the prison of their own consciences.
