Quotes

Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.

Care should be taken that the punishment does not exceed the guilt; and also that some men do not suffer for offenses for which others are not even indicted.

Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.

Faults of the head are punished in this world, those of the heart in another; but as most of our vices are compound, so also is their punishment.

Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

Reality becomes a prison to those who can’t get out of it.

Every crime has, in the moment of its perpetration, Its own avenging angel--dark misgiving, An ominous sinking at the inmost heart.

While crime is punished it yet increases.

On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break.

Wherever any one is against his will, that is to him a prison.

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 difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion is the thickness of a prison walls.

He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it.

It is not at the table, but in prison, that you learn who your true friends are.

We shall fight against them, throw them in prisons and destroy them.

No man should be judge in his own case.

If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.

While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.

Any punishment that does not correct, that can merely rouse rebellion in whoever has to endure it, is a piece of gratuitous infamy which makes those who impose it more guilty in the eyes of humanity, good sense and reason, nay a hundred times more guilty than the victim on whom the punishment is inflicted.

We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.

The uneven impact of actual enforcement measures tends to mirror and reinforce more general patterns of discrimination (along socioeconomic, racial and ethnic, sexual, and perhaps generational lines) within the society. As a consequence, such enforcement (ineffective as it may be in producing conformity) almost certainly reinforces feelings of alienation already prevalent within major segments of the population.

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. Even if one takes every reefer madness allegation of the prohibitionists at face value, marijuana prohibition has done far more harm to far more people than marijuana ever could.

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.

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.

In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.