No man should be judge in his own case.
Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.
Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
If you want total security, go to prison. There you’re fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking…is freedom.
No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.
Trial by jury itself, instead of being a security to persons who are accused, shall be a delusion, a mockery, and a snare.
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.
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 know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.
Taught from infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.
Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.
Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.
The number of laws is constantly growing in all countries and, owing to this, what is called crime is very often not a crime at all, for it contains no element of violence or harm.
If you share the crime of your friend, you make it your own.
Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.
What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached.
To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.
Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future lives and crimes to society.
Most people fancy themselves innocent of those crimes of which they cannot be convicted.
The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.
If we look at Houston, which is a very environmentally toxic place, we find that it has one of the highest levels of young men going to prison and also among the highest levels of illiteracy in the country.
Do not lay on the multitude the blame that is due to a few.
Self is the only prison that can bind the soul.
