Quotes

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.

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.

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

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.

There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.

Women now have choices. They can be married, not married, have a job, not have a job, be married with children, unmarried with children. Men have the same choice we've always had: work, or prison.

The world is a prison in which solitary confinement is preferable.

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

To trial bring her stolen charms, and let her prison be my arms.

The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.

In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.

Women have worked hard; starved in prison; given of their time and lives that we might sit in the House of Commons and take part in the legislating of this country.

Fear can be like a prison. It is, however, a self made prison. Many are imprisoned by fear. No one else can liberate them from this prison. Others may inspire them but they must liberate themselves.

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

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.

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

It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.

Written laws are like spiders' webs, and will, like them, only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful will easily break through them.

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.

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.

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

It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.

He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it.

Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.

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