Quotes

To trial bring her stolen charms, and let her prison be my arms.

While crime is punished it yet increases.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

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.

One crime is everything; two nothing.

History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.

Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.

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.

It is hard, but it is excellent, to find the right knowledge of when correction is necessary and when grace doth most avail.

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

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.

It is certain that the study of human psychology, if it were undertaken exclusively in prisons, would also lead to misrepresentation and absurd generalizations.

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.

The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.

You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.

Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrist? And what has he been after that they groan and shake their fists? And wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air? Oh they're taking him to prison for the colour of his hair.

He who profits by a crime commits it.

The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.

The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.

The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.

The difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion is the thickness of a prison walls.

Prosecution I have managed to avoid; but I have been arrested, charged in a police court, have refused to be bound over, and thereupon have been unconditionally released - to my great regret; for I have always wanted to know what going to prison was like.

Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.

The world is a prison in which solitary confinement is preferable.

Vices are not crimes.