Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.
No man should be judge in his own case.
The mellow sweetness of pumpkin pie off a prison spoon is something you will never forget.
I have never been contained except I made the prison.
We shall fight against them, throw them in prisons and destroy them.
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.
The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.
The difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion is the thickness of a prison walls.
I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice.
Prison makes you a better judge of character. You pick up on people much faster.
Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.
It is true you cannot eat freedom and you cannot power machinery with democracy. But then neither can political prisoners turn on the light in the cells of a dictatorship.
Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.
The contagion of crime is like that of the plague. Criminals collected together corrupt each other; they are worse than ever when at the termination of their punishment they re-enter society.
One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.
Whatever you think of de Sade, he was a complex figure and we should not look for easy answers with him. He was, strangely perhaps, against the death penalty, and he was never put in prison for murders or anything like that.
I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky.
It is certain that the study of human psychology, if it were undertaken exclusively in prisons, would also lead to misrepresentation and absurd generalizations.
Crime is a logical extension of the sort of behavior that often [is] considered perfectly respectable in legitimate business.
I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
There are few better measures of the concern a society has for its individual members and its own well being than the way it handles criminals.
Here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to be to restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work.
Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.
On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break.
