If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.
The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.
It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.
I just remember that disturbing feeling of walking into that prison, the complete loss of privacy, the complete loss of stimulation, dignity.
Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.
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.
History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.
Every crime has, in the moment of its perpetration, Its own avenging angel--dark misgiving, An ominous sinking at the inmost heart.
No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.
If you want total security, go to prison. There you’re fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking…is freedom.
Society has used the juvenile courts to create a caste system where there are throw-away people.
~James Bell
Organized crime in America takes in over forty billion dollars a year. This is quite a profitable sum, especially when one considers that the Mafia spends very little for office supplies.
The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.
Most people fancy themselves innocent of those crimes of which they cannot be convicted.
No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
I was in prison, and you came unto me. Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.
~(Jesus Christ) Matthew 25:36, 40
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.
Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a God.
There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.
Self is the only prison that can bind the soul.
Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached.
It is hard, but it is excellent, to find the right knowledge of when correction is necessary and when grace doth most avail.
Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.
