Quotes

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

In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.

We shall not yield to violence. We shall not be deprived of union freedoms. We shall never agree with sending people to prison for their convictions.

Three hundred years ago a prisoner condemned to the Tower of London carved on the wall of his cell this sentiment to keep up his spirits during his long imprisonment: “It is not adversity that kills, but the impatience with which we bear adversity.”

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

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.

He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it.

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.

A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.

Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.

Crimes generally punish themselves.

Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.

I existed in a world that never is - the prison of the mind.

If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.

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

Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.

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.

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

I have never been contained except I made the prison.

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.

To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.

Forgiveness, that noblest of all self-denial, is a virtue which he alone who can practise in himself can willingly believe in another.

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

Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.

If it's near dinner-time, the foreman takes out his watch when the jury has retired, and says: "Dear me, gentlemen, ten minutes to five, I declare! I dine at five, gentlemen." "So do I," says everybody else, except two men who ought to have dined at three and seem more than half disposed to stand out in consequence. The foreman smiles, and puts up his watch:--"Well, gentlemen, what do we say, plaintiff or defendant, gentlemen?