I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.
There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.
Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.
Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.
Every crime has, in the moment of its perpetration, Its own avenging angel--dark misgiving, An ominous sinking at the inmost heart.
If you strike at, imprison, or kill us, out of our prisons or graves we will still evoke a spirit that will thwart you, and perhaps, raise a force that will destroy you! We defy you! Do your worst!
Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.
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.
The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.
We're in a war. People who blast some pot on a casual basis are guilty of treason.
Some laws of state aimed at curbing crime are even more criminal.
Here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to be to restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work.
Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.
The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.
No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.
Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.
Most people fancy themselves innocent of those crimes of which they cannot be convicted.
If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.
You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.
