Quotes

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

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

Taught from infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.

Wherever any one is against his will, that is to him a prison.

They're not supposed to show prison films in prison. Especially ones that are about escaping.

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!

A man who has no excuse for a crime, is indeed defenseless!

A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards, as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.

The perfection of a thing consists in its essence; there are perfect criminals, as there are men of perfect probity.

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.

Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.

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

While crime is punished it yet increases.

Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.

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

When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.

He who opens a school door, closes a prison.

To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.

The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.

A country is in a bad state, which is governed only by laws; because a thousand things occur for which laws cannot provide, and where authority ought to interpose.

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.

It is true you cannot eat freedom and you cannot power machinery with democracy. But then neither can political prisoners turn on the light in the cells of a dictatorship.

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

The solution to our drug problem is not in incarceration.

Vices are not crimes.