When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
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.
Forgiveness, that noblest of all self-denial, is a virtue which he alone who can practise in himself can willingly believe in another.
Whatever is worthy to be loved for anything is worthy of preservation. A wise and dispassionate legislator, if any such should ever arise among men, will not condemn to death him who has done or is likely to do more service than injury to society. Blocks and gibbets are the nearest objects with legislators, and their business is never with hopes or with virtues.
The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.
They're not supposed to show prison films in prison. Especially ones that are about escaping.
The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.
Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them.
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.
The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.
Well does Heaven have care that no man secures happiness by crime.
Most people fancy themselves innocent of those crimes of which they cannot be convicted.
If it's near dinner-time, the foreman takes out his watch when the jury has retired, and says: "Dear me, gentlemen, ten minutes to five, I declare! I dine at five, gentlemen." "So do I," says everybody else, except two men who ought to have dined at three and seem more than half disposed to stand out in consequence. The foreman smiles, and puts up his watch:--"Well, gentlemen, what do we say, plaintiff or defendant, gentlemen?
I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.
Vices are not crimes.
You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.
It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.
To be at peace in crime! Ah, who can thus flatter himself.
We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.
Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
In my country we go to prison first and then become President.
Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.
On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break.
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.