Quotes

Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.

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.

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

They were being driven to a prison, through no fault of their own, in all probability for life. In comparison, how much easier it would be to walk to the gallows than to this tomb of living horrors!

I have been studying how I may compare This prison where I live unto the world; And, for because the world is populous, And here is not a creature but myself, I cannot do it. Yet I'll hammer it out.

When is conduct a crime, and when is a crime not a crime? When Somebody Up There -- a monarch, a dictator, a Pope, a legislator -- so decrees.

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

If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.

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

Some laws of state aimed at curbing crime are even more criminal.

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

If two people fight on the street, whose fault is it? Who is the criminal? It is the government’s responsibility because the government has not educated the people to not make mistakes. The people have inadequate, incompetent education, so they make mistakes! It is such a fraud.

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

Care should be taken that the punishment does not exceed the guilt; and also that some men do not suffer for offenses for which others are not even indicted.

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.

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

The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.

As we grow in wisdom, we pardon more freely.

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

In prison, you get the chance to see who really loves you.

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.

Every crime has, in the moment of its perpetration, Its own avenging angel--dark misgiving, An ominous sinking at the inmost heart.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

By noiselessly going to a prison a civil-resister ensures a calm atmosphere.

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