Quotes

I sometimes wish that people would put a little more emphasis upon the observance of the law than they do upon its enforcement.

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.

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%.

Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.

Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.

Extreme justice is extreme injustice.

Any punishment that does not correct, that can merely rouse rebellion in whoever has to endure it, is a piece of gratuitous infamy which makes those who impose it more guilty in the eyes of humanity, good sense and reason, nay a hundred times more guilty than the victim on whom the punishment is inflicted.

The only effect of public punishment is to show the rabble how bravely it can be borne; and that every one who hath lost a toe-nail hath suffered worse.

Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.

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

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

If you want total security, go to prison. There you’re fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking…is freedom.

I can work for the Lord in or out of prison.

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

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

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.

If we look at Houston, which is a very environmentally toxic place, we find that it has one of the highest levels of young men going to prison and also among the highest levels of illiteracy in the country.

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.

Crime succeeds by sudden despatch; honest counsels gain vigor by delay.

The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.

We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.

To be at peace in crime! Ah, who can thus flatter himself.

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

I can tell you this on a stack of Bibles: prisons are archaic, brutal, unregenerative, overcrowded hell holes where the inmates are treated like animals with absolutely not one humane thought given to what they are going to do once they are released. You're an animal in a cage and you're treated like one.

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