Quotes

Written laws are like spiders' webs, and will, like them, only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful will easily break through them.

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

In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.

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

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.

The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.

I never told a victim story about my imprisonment. Instead, I told a transformation story - about how prison changed my outlook, about how I saw that communication, truth, and trust are at the heart of power.

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.

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.

Well does Heaven have care that no man secures happiness by crime.

The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business.

Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.

The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.

How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.

One man meets an infamous punishment for that crime which confers a diadem upon another.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

If you share the crime of your friend, you make it your own.

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%.

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.

It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.

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

We are prisoners of ideas.

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

I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice.