Quotes

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.

The only effect of public punishment is to show the rabble how bravely it can be borne; and that every one who hath lost a toe-nail hath suffered worse.

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

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.

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

Faults of the head are punished in this world, those of the heart in another; but as most of our vices are compound, so also is their punishment.

The mellow sweetness of pumpkin pie off a prison spoon is something you will never forget.

If you want total security, go to prison. There you’re fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking…is freedom.

There is a point at which even justice does injury.

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.

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.

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

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

It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.

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

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

Law is merely the expression of the will of the strongest for the time being, and therefore laws have no fixity, but shift from generation to generation.

They took away my money, my family, and my security. Why couldn't they destroy my ideas? We will question them in court tomorrow as we trigger The Revolution of all revolutions!

We who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments.

In prison, you get the chance to see who really loves you.

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.

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

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.

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