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.
How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.
I existed in a world that never is - the prison of the mind.
The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
The number of laws is constantly growing in all countries and, owing to this, what is called crime is very often not a crime at all, for it contains no element of violence or harm.
To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.
Justice renders to every one his due.
Written laws are like spiders' webs, and will, like them, only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful will easily break through them.
Every instance of a man's suffering the penalty of the law is an instance of the failure of that penalty in effecting its purpose, which is to deter.
The mellow sweetness of pumpkin pie off a prison spoon is something you will never forget.
Women now have choices. They can be married, not married, have a job, not have a job, be married with children, unmarried with children. Men have the same choice we've always had: work, or prison.
Wherever any one is against his will, that is to him a prison.
Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.
Let us remember that justice must be observed even to the lowest.
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.
If two people fight on the street, whose fault is it? Who is the criminal? It is the government’s responsibility because the government has not educated the people to not make mistakes. The people have inadequate, incompetent education, so they make mistakes! It is such a fraud.
I can work for the Lord in or out of prison.
If we look at Houston, which is a very environmentally toxic place, we find that it has one of the highest levels of young men going to prison and also among the highest levels of illiteracy in the country.
The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.
In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.
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.
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.
A man who has no excuse for a crime, is indeed defenseless!
Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?
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.
