Quotes

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.

Virtue pardons the wicked, as the sandal-tree perfumes the axe which strikes it.

Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.

The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They keep returning to the same things.

Extreme justice is extreme injustice.

Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.

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

Punishment, that is the justice for the unjust.

We are prisoners of ideas.

Every instance of a man's suffering the penalty of the law is an instance of the failure of that penalty in effecting its purpose, which is to deter.

Since 1957, black people have experienced double-digit unemployment - in good times and bad times. Look at the population of African Americans in prison. They represent more than half the population of prisoners in the country, 55 percent of those on death row.

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

Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.

Federal prison, if you get any of it, you're going to have to do 85% of it. And the reason why I called it that is because I had a friend who got sent to the federal joint and his whole... it wasn't about him being in jail. He cried about the 85%.

In prison, you get the chance to see who really loves you.

Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.

The uneven impact of actual enforcement measures tends to mirror and reinforce more general patterns of discrimination (along socioeconomic, racial and ethnic, sexual, and perhaps generational lines) within the society. As a consequence, such enforcement (ineffective as it may be in producing conformity) almost certainly reinforces feelings of alienation already prevalent within major segments of the population.

Experts and the educated elite have replaced what worked with what sounded good. Society was far more civilized before they took over our schools, prisons, welfare programs, police departments and courts. It's high time we ran these people out of our lives and went back to common sense.

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

Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our duty is to furnish it well.

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.

He who opens a school door, closes a prison.

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

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

Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.