The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business.
If you treat prisoners well, they will be less angry, less inclined to violence inside prison, less likely to provoke violent actions by guards, less likely to have reason to file brutality lawsuits that cost taxpayers a bundle and waste administrators' time. And most important, well-treated prisoners will be less likely to leave prison angrier, more vicious and more inclined to criminal behavior than when they went in.
There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.
It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.
Self is the only prison that can bind the soul.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
Man is condemned to be free.
Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a God.
No man should be judge in his own case.
On average, drug prisoners spend more time in federal prison than rapists, who often get out on early release because of the overcrowding in prison caused by the Drug War.
He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it.
Fear can be like a prison. It is, however, a self made prison. Many are imprisoned by fear. No one else can liberate them from this prison. Others may inspire them but they must liberate themselves.
In my country we go to prison first and then become President.
On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break.
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.
Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.
I can tell you this on a stack of Bibles: prisons are archaic, brutal, unregenerative, overcrowded hell holes where the inmates are treated like animals with absolutely not one humane thought given to what they are going to do once they are released. You're an animal in a cage and you're treated like one.
Virtue pardons the wicked, as the sandal-tree perfumes the axe which strikes it.
The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.
Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
There is no greater punishment of wickedness that that it is dissatisfied with itself and its deeds.
Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilization.
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 sometimes wish that people would put a little more emphasis upon the observance of the law than they do upon its enforcement.
