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.

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.

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

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

I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.

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

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

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

If you want total security, go to prison. There you’re fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking…is freedom.

We're in a war. People who blast some pot on a casual basis are guilty of treason.

Crime is a logical extension of the sort of behavior that often [is] considered perfectly respectable in legitimate business.

A variety in punishment is of utility, as well as a proportion.

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

If you strike at, imprison, or kill us, out of our prisons or graves we will still evoke a spirit that will thwart you, and perhaps, raise a force that will destroy you! We defy you! Do your worst!

When you are younger you get blamed for crimes you never committed and when you're older you begin to get credit for virtues you never possessed. It evens itself out.

The uneven impact of actual enforcement measures tends to mirror and reinforce more general patterns of discrimination (along socioeconomic, racial and ethnic, sexual, and perhaps generational lines) within the society. As a consequence, such enforcement (ineffective as it may be in producing conformity) almost certainly reinforces feelings of alienation already prevalent within major segments of the population.

Crime succeeds by sudden despatch; honest counsels gain vigor by delay.

I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.

No man survives when freedom fails. The best men rot in filthy jails, and those who cry 'appease, appease' are hanged by those they tried to please.

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.

Before we can diminish our sufferings from the ill-controlled aggressive assaults of fellow citizens, we must renounce the philosophy of punishment, the obsolete, vengeful penal attitude. In its place we would seek a comprehensive, constructive social attitude - therapeutic in some instances, restraining in some instances, but preventive in its total social impact. In the last analysis this becomes a question of personal morals and values. No matter how glorified or how piously disguised, vengeance as a human motive must be personally repudiated by each and every one of us.

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

Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.

Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.

Whatever you think of de Sade, he was a complex figure and we should not look for easy answers with him. He was, strangely perhaps, against the death penalty, and he was never put in prison for murders or anything like that.