Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
I know not whether laws be right, or whether laws be wrong; All that we know who lie in gaol is that the wall is strong; And that each day is like a year, a year whose days are long.
If you share the crime of your friend, you make it your own.
Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.
Let us remember that justice must be observed even to the lowest.
What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.
Prison makes you a better judge of character. You pick up on people much faster.
Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.
Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts.
Since 1957, black people have experienced double-digit unemployment - in good times and bad times. Look at the population of African Americans in prison. They represent more than half the population of prisoners in the country, 55 percent of those on death row.
There's no greater threat to our independence, to our cherished freedoms and personal liberties than the continual, relentless injection of these insidious poisons into our system. We must decide whether we cherish independence from drugs, without which there is no freedom.
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.
I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.
Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X came out of prison stronger.
In prison, you get the chance to see who really loves you.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
Hanging was the worst use a man could be put to.
A country is in a bad state, which is governed only by laws; because a thousand things occur for which laws cannot provide, and where authority ought to interpose.
We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.
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.
He who profits by a crime commits it.
The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.
The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They keep returning to the same things.
I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.