Quotes

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

Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.

We have our own system, ... and journalists in our system are not put in prison for embarrassing the government by revealing things the government might not wish to have revealed. The important thing is that our system, under which journalists can write without fear or favor, should continue.

How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.

To be at peace in crime! Ah, who can thus flatter himself.

Society has used the juvenile courts to create a caste system where there are throw-away people.

If two people fight on the street, whose fault is it? Who is the criminal? It is the government’s responsibility because the government has not educated the people to not make mistakes. The people have inadequate, incompetent education, so they make mistakes! It is such a fraud.

Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.

While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.

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.

What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.

On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break.

Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.

The public have more interest in the punishment of an injury than he who receives it.

Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.

Whatever you think of de Sade, he was a complex figure and we should not look for easy answers with him. He was, strangely perhaps, against the death penalty, and he was never put in prison for murders or anything like that.

By noiselessly going to a prison a civil-resister ensures a calm atmosphere.

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.

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

I sometimes wish that people would put a little more emphasis upon the observance of the law than they do upon its enforcement.

Organized crime in America takes in over forty billion dollars a year. This is quite a profitable sum, especially when one considers that the Mafia spends very little for office supplies.

Prison makes you a better judge of character. You pick up on people much faster.

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

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