Society has used the juvenile courts to create a caste system where there are throw-away people.
~James Bell
Fast closed with double grills And triple gates–the cell To wicked souls is hell; But to a mind that's innocent 'Tis only iron, wood and stone.
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.
Well does Heaven have care that no man secures happiness by crime.
The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.
In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
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.
The perfection of a thing consists in its essence; there are perfect criminals, as there are men of perfect probity.
We shall fight against them, throw them in prisons and destroy them.
The world itself is but a large prison, out of which some are daily led to execution.
Extreme justice is extreme injustice.
Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.
Hanging was the worst use a man could be put to.
There's no greater threat to our independence, to our cherished freedoms and personal liberties than the continual, relentless injection of these insidious poisons into our system. We must decide whether we cherish independence from drugs, without which there is no freedom.
Vices are not crimes.
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.
It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.
The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.
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.
Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.
What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.
Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.
There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.
Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them.
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.
