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.
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.
It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.
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.
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.
While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.
The contagion of crime is like that of the plague. Criminals collected together corrupt each other; they are worse than ever when at the termination of their punishment they re-enter society.
Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X came out of prison stronger.
Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.
You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.
There is no peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war - at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.
Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.
Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.
We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.
It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.
Pardon is the virtue of victory.
The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.
No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, that can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.
They took away my money, my family, and my security. Why couldn't they destroy my ideas? We will question them in court tomorrow as we trigger The Revolution of all revolutions!
He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it.
I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice.
I am an expert of electricity. My father occupied the chair of applied electricity at the state prison.
Wherever any one is against his will, that is to him a prison.
