Quotes

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.

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.

Organized crime in America takes in over forty billion dollars a year. This is quite a profitable sum, especially when one considers that the Mafia spends very little for office supplies.

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

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

The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.

Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.

Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future lives and crimes to society.

It is not at the table, but in prison, that you learn who your true friends are.

Taught from infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.

Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?

Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts.

The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.

Steal goods and you’ll go to prison, steal lands and you are a king.

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.

The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.

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.

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

Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.

By noiselessly going to a prison a civil-resister ensures a calm atmosphere.

So justice while she winks at crimes, Stumbles on innocence sometimes.

I sometimes wish that people would put a little more emphasis upon the observance of the law than they do upon its enforcement.

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.

I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.