Quotes

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.

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

It is not at the table, but in prison, that you learn who your true friends are.

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

Whatever you think of de Sade, he was a complex figure and we should not look for easy answers with him. He was, strangely perhaps, against the death penalty, and he was never put in prison for murders or anything like that.

Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them.

It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their own kind.

If you strike at, imprison, or kill us, out of our prisons or graves we will still evoke a spirit that will thwart you, and perhaps, raise a force that will destroy you! We defy you! Do your worst!

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

Wicked deeds are generally done, even with impunity, for the mere desire of occupation.

The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.

Do not lay on the multitude the blame that is due to a few.

It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.

On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break.

There's no greater threat to our independence, to our cherished freedoms and personal liberties than the continual, relentless injection of these insidious poisons into our system. We must decide whether we cherish independence from drugs, without which there is no freedom.

There is no peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war - at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.

The contagion of crime is like that of the plague. Criminals collected together corrupt each other; they are worse than ever when at the termination of their punishment they re-enter society.

A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.

The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.

Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X came out of prison stronger.

He had drawn many a thousand of these rations in prisons and camps, and though he'd never had an opportunity to weight them on scales, and although, being a man of timid nature, he knew no way of standing up for his rights, he, like every other prisoner, had discovered long ago that honest weight was never to be found in the bread-cutting. There was short weight in every ration. The only point was how short. So every day you took a look to soothe your soul - today, maybe, they haven't snitched any.

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

The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.

Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.

Faults of the head are punished in this world, those of the heart in another; but as most of our vices are compound, so also is their punishment.