Quotes

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

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.

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.

When you are younger you get blamed for crimes you never committed and when you're older you begin to get credit for virtues you never possessed. It evens itself out.

If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.

While crime is punished it yet increases.

To seek the redress of grievances by going to law, is like sheep running for shelter to a bramble bush.

No man survives when freedom fails. The best men rot in filthy jails, and those who cry 'appease, appease' are hanged by those they tried to please.

I have been studying how I may compare this prison where I live unto the world; Shut up in the prison of their own consciences.

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

He who opens a school door, closes a prison.

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.

Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.

I am an expert of electricity. My father occupied the chair of applied electricity at the state prison.

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

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

The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.

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.

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.

Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.

Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.

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

Money will determine whether the accused goes to prison or walks out of the courtroom a free man.

We have initiated programs for re-entry offenders, since some 500,000 to 600,000 offenders will come out of prison each year for the next three or four years. We want to have positive alternatives when they come back to the community.

The number of laws is constantly growing in all countries and, owing to this, what is called crime is very often not a crime at all, for it contains no element of violence or harm.