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.
There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.
You utter a vow, or forge a signature, and you may find yourself bound for life to a monastery, a woman, or prison.
It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.
No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.
Shyness is the prison of the heart.
No man should be judge in his own case.
One man meets an infamous punishment for that crime which confers a diadem upon another.
There is a point at which even justice does injury.
Justice renders to every one his due.
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!
It was only when I lay there on the rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not between states nor between social classes nor between political parties, but right through every human heart, through all human hearts. And that is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me, bless you, prison, for having been a part of my life.
The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.
The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.
Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts.
The severest justice may not always be the best policy.
He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it.
Prosecution I have managed to avoid; but I have been arrested, charged in a police court, have refused to be bound over, and thereupon have been unconditionally released - to my great regret; for I have always wanted to know what going to prison was like.
The public have more interest in the punishment of an injury than he who receives it.
Virtue pardons the wicked, as the sandal-tree perfumes the axe which strikes it.
You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.
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.
No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
When it comes to freedom, we are but prisoners of our own desires.
