Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.
One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.
No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.
In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
Society has used the juvenile courts to create a caste system where there are throw-away people.
~James Bell
He who opens a school door, closes a prison.
I know not whether laws be right, or whether laws be wrong; All that we know who lie in gaol is that the wall is strong; And that each day is like a year, a year whose days are long.
By noiselessly going to a prison a civil-resister ensures a calm atmosphere.
Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.
Care should be taken that the punishment does not exceed the guilt; and also that some men do not suffer for offenses for which others are not even indicted.
Since 1957, black people have experienced double-digit unemployment - in good times and bad times. Look at the population of African Americans in prison. They represent more than half the population of prisoners in the country, 55 percent of those on death row.
The public have more interest in the punishment of an injury than he who receives it.
Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.
We have initiated programs for re-entry offenders, since some 500,000 to 600,000 offenders will come out of prison each year for the next three or four years. We want to have positive alternatives when they come back to the community.
We are prisoners of ideas.
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.
Let us remember that justice must be observed even to the lowest.
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.
Crimes generally punish themselves.
Steal goods and you’ll go to prison, steal lands and you are a king.
Law is merely the expression of the will of the strongest for the time being, and therefore laws have no fixity, but shift from generation to generation.
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.
