Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.
I never told a victim story about my imprisonment. Instead, I told a transformation story - about how prison changed my outlook, about how I saw that communication, truth, and trust are at the heart of power.
Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.
Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts.
So justice while she winks at crimes, Stumbles on innocence sometimes.
Whatever you think of de Sade, he was a complex figure and we should not look for easy answers with him. He was, strangely perhaps, against the death penalty, and he was never put in prison for murders or anything like that.
One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.
Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.
There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.
We have our own system, ... and journalists in our system are not put in prison for embarrassing the government by revealing things the government might not wish to have revealed. The important thing is that our system, under which journalists can write without fear or favor, should continue.
Three hundred years ago a prisoner condemned to the Tower of London carved on the wall of his cell this sentiment to keep up his spirits during his long imprisonment: “It is not adversity that kills, but the impatience with which we bear adversity.”
I sometimes wish that people would put a little more emphasis upon the observance of the law than they do upon its enforcement.
We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business.
Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.
The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.
Forgiveness, that noblest of all self-denial, is a virtue which he alone who can practise in himself can willingly believe in another.
Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.
Justice renders to every one his due.
The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They keep returning to the same things.
Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.
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.
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.
Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached.
Crime succeeds by sudden despatch; honest counsels gain vigor by delay.
