It is certain that the study of human psychology, if it were undertaken exclusively in prisons, would also lead to misrepresentation and absurd generalizations.
Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
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.
Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
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.
Written laws are like spiders' webs, and will, like them, only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful will easily break through 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.
As we grow in wisdom, we pardon more freely.
I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.
There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.
On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break.
Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X came out of prison stronger.
Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them.
In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.
To trial bring her stolen charms, and let her prison be my arms.
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.
The mellow sweetness of pumpkin pie off a prison spoon is something you will never forget.
Vices are not crimes.
In prison, you get the chance to see who really loves you.
Self is the only prison that can bind the soul.
Do not lay on the multitude the blame that is due to a few.
A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards, as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.
In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up...I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through, before they could get to be as free as I was.
Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.
