Quotes

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.

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.

Before we can diminish our sufferings from the ill-controlled aggressive assaults of fellow citizens, we must renounce the philosophy of punishment, the obsolete, vengeful penal attitude. In its place we would seek a comprehensive, constructive social attitude - therapeutic in some instances, restraining in some instances, but preventive in its total social impact. In the last analysis this becomes a question of personal morals and values. No matter how glorified or how piously disguised, vengeance as a human motive must be personally repudiated by each and every one of us.

On average, drug prisoners spend more time in federal prison than rapists, who often get out on early release because of the overcrowding in prison caused by the Drug War.

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

Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts.

To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.

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

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

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

Adversities such as being homeless and going to prison has made many people stronger.

Justice renders to every one his due.

Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.

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

The world is a prison in which solitary confinement is preferable.

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.

Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a God.

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.

I have never been contained except I made the prison.

Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrist? And what has he been after that they groan and shake their fists? And wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air? Oh they're taking him to prison for the colour of his hair.

The severest justice may not always be the best policy.

Punishment, that is the justice for the unjust.

Whatever is worthy to be loved for anything is worthy of preservation. A wise and dispassionate legislator, if any such should ever arise among men, will not condemn to death him who has done or is likely to do more service than injury to society. Blocks and gibbets are the nearest objects with legislators, and their business is never with hopes or with virtues.

Extreme justice is extreme injustice.

Concepts of justice must have hands and feet to carry out justice in every case in the shortest possible time and the lowest possible cost. That is the challenge to every lawyer and judge in America.