Quotes

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

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

Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.

The solution to our drug problem is not in incarceration.

Trial by jury itself, instead of being a security to persons who are accused, shall be a delusion, a mockery, and a snare.

The contagion of crime is like that of the plague. Criminals collected together corrupt each other; they are worse than ever when at the termination of their punishment they re-enter society.

Well does Heaven have care that no man secures happiness by crime.

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

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.

There is no greater punishment of wickedness that that it is dissatisfied with itself and its deeds.

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.

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.

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.

Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilization.

No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.

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

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

Virtue pardons the wicked, as the sandal-tree perfumes the axe which strikes it.

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

They took away my money, my family, and my security. Why couldn't they destroy my ideas? We will question them in court tomorrow as we trigger The Revolution of all revolutions!

A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.

Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a God.

Federal prison, if you get any of it, you're going to have to do 85% of it. And the reason why I called it that is because I had a friend who got sent to the federal joint and his whole... it wasn't about him being in jail. He cried about the 85%.

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.

One man meets an infamous punishment for that crime which confers a diadem upon another.