Quotes

What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.

The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.

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

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.

Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.

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

Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.

History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.

The solution to our drug problem is not in incarceration.

Shyness is the prison of the heart.

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

To trial bring her stolen charms, and let her prison be my arms.

One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.

Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.

Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.

America is the land of the second chance – and when the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.

In jail a man has no personality. He is a minor disposal problem and a few entries on reports. Nobody cares who loves or hates him, what he looks like, what he did with his life. Nobody reacts to him unless he gives trouble. Nobody abuses him. All that is asked of him is that he go quietly to the right cell and remain quiet when he gets there. There is nothing to fight against, nothing to be mad at. The jailers are quiet men without animosity or sadism.

Organized crime in America takes in over forty billion dollars a year. This is quite a profitable sum, especially when one considers that the Mafia spends very little for office supplies.

A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.