I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up...I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through, before they could get to be as free as I was.
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.
It is safer that a bad man should not be accused, than that he should be acquitted.
Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
I have never been contained except I made the prison.
Do not lay on the multitude the blame that is due to a few.
I sometimes wish that people would put a little more emphasis upon the observance of the law than they do upon its enforcement.
The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.
Crimes generally punish themselves.
In jail a man has no personality. He is a minor disposal problem and a few entries on reports. Nobody cares who loves or hates him, what he looks like, what he did with his life. Nobody reacts to him unless he gives trouble. Nobody abuses him. All that is asked of him is that he go quietly to the right cell and remain quiet when he gets there. There is nothing to fight against, nothing to be mad at. The jailers are quiet men without animosity or sadism.
He who opens a school door, closes a prison.
The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.
Women have worked hard; starved in prison; given of their time and lives that we might sit in the House of Commons and take part in the legislating of this country.
By noiselessly going to a prison a civil-resister ensures a calm atmosphere.
How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.
It is certain that the study of human psychology, if it were undertaken exclusively in prisons, would also lead to misrepresentation and absurd generalizations.
A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
One man meets an infamous punishment for that crime which confers a diadem upon another.
We shall not yield to violence. We shall not be deprived of union freedoms. We shall never agree with sending people to prison for their convictions.
Law is merely the expression of the will of the strongest for the time being, and therefore laws have no fixity, but shift from generation to generation.
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.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
Trial by jury itself, instead of being a security to persons who are accused, shall be a delusion, a mockery, and a snare.
