Quotes

I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.

No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.

In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.

We are prisoners of ideas.

When it comes to freedom, we are but prisoners of our own desires.

Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.

The severest justice may not always be the best policy.

It is hard, but it is excellent, to find the right knowledge of when correction is necessary and when grace doth most avail.

Fear can be like a prison. It is, however, a self made prison. Many are imprisoned by fear. No one else can liberate them from this prison. Others may inspire them but they must liberate themselves.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

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.

To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.

It is certain that the study of human psychology, if it were undertaken exclusively in prisons, would also lead to misrepresentation and absurd generalizations.

It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.

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

Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future lives and crimes to society.

Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilization.

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

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.

There is no peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war - at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.

Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.

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

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.

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.