To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.
Wicked deeds are generally done, even with impunity, for the mere desire of occupation.
We shall fight against them, throw them in prisons and destroy them.
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.
Society has used the juvenile courts to create a caste system where there are throw-away people.
~James Bell
Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They keep returning to the same things.
In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.
The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.
No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.
You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.
If two people fight on the street, whose fault is it? Who is the criminal? It is the government’s responsibility because the government has not educated the people to not make mistakes. The people have inadequate, incompetent education, so they make mistakes! It is such a fraud.
The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.
To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.
No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.
I don't like being famous - it is like a prison. And driving for Ferrari would make it far worse.
Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?
He who opens a school door, closes a prison.
Written laws are like spiders' webs, and will, like them, only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful will easily break through them.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
Justice renders to every one his due.
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.
