Quotes

To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.

Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.

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.

Governments have tried to stop crime through punishment throughout the ages, but crime continued in the past punishment remains. Crime can only be stopped through a preventive approach in the schools. You teach the students Transcendental Meditation, and right away they’ll begin using their full brain physiology sensible and they will not get sidetracked into wrong things.

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.

Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.

I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up...I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through, before they could get to be as free as I was. I did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar.

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

Show me the prison, Show me the jail, Show me the prisoner whose life has gone stale. And I'll show you a young man with so many reasons why And there, but for fortune, go you or I.

In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.

Here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to be to restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work.

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

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

The solution to our drug problem is not in incarceration.

When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.

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

How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.

While crime is punished it yet increases.

The difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion is the thickness of a prison walls.

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

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

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

We who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments.

I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.

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.