Quotes

Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

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

Vices are not crimes.

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

I know not whether laws be right, or whether laws be wrong; All that we know who lie in gaol is that the wall is strong; And that each day is like a year, a year whose days are long.

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!

Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.

Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our duty is to furnish it well.

There are few better measures of the concern a society has for its individual members and its own well being than the way it handles criminals.

Society has used the juvenile courts to create a caste system where there are throw-away people.

Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.

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

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.

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.

Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.

Concepts of justice must have hands and feet to carry out justice in every case in the shortest possible time and the lowest possible cost. That is the challenge to every lawyer and judge in America.

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

I have been studying how I may compare this prison where I live unto the world; Shut up in the prison of their own consciences.

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.

Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.

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!

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.

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.

Let us remember that justice must be observed even to the lowest.

How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.