Quotes

A country is in a bad state, which is governed only by laws; because a thousand things occur for which laws cannot provide, and where authority ought to interpose.

I existed in a world that never is - the prison of the mind.

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 common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.

Since 1957, black people have experienced double-digit unemployment - in good times and bad times. Look at the population of African Americans in prison. They represent more than half the population of prisoners in the country, 55 percent of those on death row.

History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.

Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.

Punishment, that is the justice for the unjust.

Self is the only prison that can bind the soul.

Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.

The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.

The severest justice may not always be the best policy.

The public have more interest in the punishment of an injury than he who receives it.

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

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.

The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.

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

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.

Forgiveness, that noblest of all self-denial, is a virtue which he alone who can practise in himself can willingly believe in another.

We have initiated programs for re-entry offenders, since some 500,000 to 600,000 offenders will come out of prison each year for the next three or four years. We want to have positive alternatives when they come back to the community.

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.

The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.

A man who has no excuse for a crime, is indeed defenseless!

I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.

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