He who opens a school door, closes a prison.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.
No crime has been without a precedent.
No man survives when freedom fails. The best men rot in filthy jails, and those who cry 'appease, appease' are hanged by those they tried to please.
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.
Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.
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.
They were being driven to a prison, through no fault of their own, in all probability for life. In comparison, how much easier it would be to walk to the gallows than to this tomb of living horrors!
In prison, you get the chance to see who really loves you.
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.
The torment of human frustration, whatever its immediate cause, is the knowledge that the self is in prison, its vital force and 'mangled mind' leaking away in lonely, wasteful self-conflict.
No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
I sometimes wish that people would put a little more emphasis upon the observance of the law than they do upon its enforcement.
The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.
Well does Heaven have care that no man secures happiness by crime.
To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.
I just remember that disturbing feeling of walking into that prison, the complete loss of privacy, the complete loss of stimulation, dignity.
It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their own kind.
When is conduct a crime, and when is a crime not a crime? When Somebody Up There -- a monarch, a dictator, a Pope, a legislator -- so decrees.
America is the land of the second chance – and when the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life.
The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They keep returning to the same things.
Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.
Women now have choices. They can be married, not married, have a job, not have a job, be married with children, unmarried with children. Men have the same choice we've always had: work, or prison.
One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.
Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached.
