Money will determine whether the accused goes to prison or walks out of the courtroom a free man.
The world itself is but a large prison, out of which some are daily led to execution.
Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.
To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.
The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.
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.
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.
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.
It is not at the table, but in prison, that you learn who your true friends are.
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.
It is hard, but it is excellent, to find the right knowledge of when correction is necessary and when grace doth most avail.
Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached.
Here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to be to restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work.
Crime is a logical extension of the sort of behavior that often [is] considered perfectly respectable in legitimate business.
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.
I never told a victim story about my imprisonment. Instead, I told a transformation story - about how prison changed my outlook, about how I saw that communication, truth, and trust are at the heart of power.
We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business.
Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our duty is to furnish it well.
I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.
Well does Heaven have care that no man secures happiness by crime.
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.
Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.
The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.
I existed in a world that never is - the prison of the mind.
The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.
