Quotes

The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.

Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.

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.

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

Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.

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

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.

Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?

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

Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.

It is impossible to go through life without trust: That is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.

We are prisoners of ideas.

Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.

One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.

Crime is a logical extension of the sort of behavior that often [is] considered perfectly respectable in legitimate business.

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

The only difference between me and my fellow actors is that I've spent more time in jail.

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.

Concepts of justice must have hands and feet to carry out justice in every case in the shortest possible time and the lowest possible cost. That is the challenge to every lawyer and judge in America.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.

On average, drug prisoners spend more time in federal prison than rapists, who often get out on early release because of the overcrowding in prison caused by the Drug War.

To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.

I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.

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.