Quotes

No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, that can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.

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

Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.

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

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.

Extreme justice is extreme injustice.

The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business.

One crime is everything; two nothing.

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.

Show me the prison, Show me the jail, Show me the prisoner whose life has gone stale. And I'll show you a young man with so many reasons why And there, but for fortune, go you or I.

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

Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts.

I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.

The world is a prison in which solitary confinement is preferable.

Governments have tried to stop crime through punishment throughout the ages, but crime continued in the past punishment remains. Crime can only be stopped through a preventive approach in the schools. You teach the students Transcendental Meditation, and right away they’ll begin using their full brain physiology sensible and they will not get sidetracked into wrong things.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.

Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a God.

One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.

Faults of the head are punished in this world, those of the heart in another; but as most of our vices are compound, so also is their punishment.

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.

Pardon is the virtue of victory.

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.

It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their own kind.

If we look at Houston, which is a very environmentally toxic place, we find that it has one of the highest levels of young men going to prison and also among the highest levels of illiteracy in the country.