There are few better measures of the concern a society has for its individual members and its own well being than the way it handles criminals.
No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.
It is true you cannot eat freedom and you cannot power machinery with democracy. But then neither can political prisoners turn on the light in the cells of a dictatorship.
Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.
The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.
I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.
Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.
I have been studying how I may compare this prison where I live unto the world; Shut up in the prison of their own consciences.
No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, that can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.
A sick person is a prisoner.
Nor stony tower, nor walls of beaten brass, Nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron, Can be retentive to the strength of spirit; But life, being weary of these worldly bars, Never lacks power to dismiss itself.
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.
Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
Crime is a logical extension of the sort of behavior that often [is] considered perfectly respectable in legitimate business.
Let us remember that justice must be observed even to the lowest.
No man should be judge in his own case.
And while God had work for Paul, he found him friends both in court and prison. Let persecutors send saints to prison, God can provide a keeper for their turn.
Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.
It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.
Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our duty is to furnish it well.
Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.
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.
When it comes to freedom, we are but prisoners of our own desires.
Every instance of a man's suffering the penalty of the law is an instance of the failure of that penalty in effecting its purpose, which is to deter.
