Quotes

What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.

It is hard, but it is excellent, to find the right knowledge of when correction is necessary and when grace doth most avail.

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.

Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.

It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.

I am an expert of electricity. My father occupied the chair of applied electricity at the state prison.

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

It is true you cannot eat freedom and you cannot power machinery with democracy. But then neither can political prisoners turn on the light in the cells of a dictatorship.

I never told a victim story about my imprisonment. Instead, I told a transformation story - about how prison changed my outlook, about how I saw that communication, truth, and trust are at the heart of power.

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.

To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.

Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.

Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.

In prison, you get the chance to see who really loves you.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

A sick person is a prisoner.

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.

Wicked deeds are generally done, even with impunity, for the mere desire of occupation.

Whatever is worthy to be loved for anything is worthy of preservation. A wise and dispassionate legislator, if any such should ever arise among men, will not condemn to death him who has done or is likely to do more service than injury to society. Blocks and gibbets are the nearest objects with legislators, and their business is never with hopes or with virtues.

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.

Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.

Hanging was the worst use a man could be put to.

Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.

The world itself is but a large prison, out of which some are daily led to execution.