Quotes

No crime has been without a precedent.

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

Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.

Society has used the juvenile courts to create a caste system where there are throw-away people.

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.

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

Reality becomes a prison to those who can’t get out of it.

Forgiveness, that noblest of all self-denial, is a virtue which he alone who can practise in himself can willingly believe in another.

When is conduct a crime, and when is a crime not a crime? When Somebody Up There -- a monarch, a dictator, a Pope, a legislator -- so decrees.

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

While crime is punished it yet increases.

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

The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.

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.

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.

Experts and the educated elite have replaced what worked with what sounded good. Society was far more civilized before they took over our schools, prisons, welfare programs, police departments and courts. It's high time we ran these people out of our lives and went back to common sense.

Before we can diminish our sufferings from the ill-controlled aggressive assaults of fellow citizens, we must renounce the philosophy of punishment, the obsolete, vengeful penal attitude. In its place we would seek a comprehensive, constructive social attitude - therapeutic in some instances, restraining in some instances, but preventive in its total social impact. In the last analysis this becomes a question of personal morals and values. No matter how glorified or how piously disguised, vengeance as a human motive must be personally repudiated by each and every one of us.

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

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

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

In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.

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.

Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.

Virtue pardons the wicked, as the sandal-tree perfumes the axe which strikes it.

It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.