Quotes

The solution to our drug problem is not in incarceration.

To seek the redress of grievances by going to law, is like sheep running for shelter to a bramble bush.

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.

Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.

Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.

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

I have never been contained except I made the prison.

In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.

I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice.

I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.

If you share the crime of your friend, you make it your own.

We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business.

The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.

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. Even if one takes every reefer madness allegation of the prohibitionists at face value, marijuana prohibition has done far more harm to far more people than marijuana ever could.

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.

The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.

No crime has been without a precedent.

On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break.

Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.

There's no greater threat to our independence, to our cherished freedoms and personal liberties than the continual, relentless injection of these insidious poisons into our system. We must decide whether we cherish independence from drugs, without which there is no freedom.

Body is a home, a prison and a grave.

Law is merely the expression of the will of the strongest for the time being, and therefore laws have no fixity, but shift from generation to generation.

Punishment, that is the justice for the unjust.

Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.

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