Quotes

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.

Nor stony tower, nor walls of beaten brass, Nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron, Can be retentive to the strength of spirit; But life, being weary of these worldly bars, Never lacks power to dismiss itself.

He was a first-time nonviolent possible offender, ... And under the mandatory minimums, he was put in prison for 15 years. Not only does the punishment not fit the crime, but the mandatory minimums don't give judges any discretion to look at the background of the case, to read into the specifics of the case. I don't know a judge who really is in favor of the mandatory minimums.

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.

It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.

To try to raise a son from inside the prison walls is a very difficult thing. But I want to say to the world my son at 16 was the one who tried the most to get me out of prison.
~Jim Bakker

The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.

The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.

They're not supposed to show prison films in prison. Especially ones that are about escaping.

I existed in a world that never is - the prison of the mind.

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

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.

Every instance of a man's suffering the penalty of the law is an instance of the failure of that penalty in effecting its purpose, which is to deter.

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

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.

The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.

Extreme justice is extreme injustice.

He who opens a school door, closes a prison.

While crime is punished it yet increases.

To seek the redress of grievances by going to law, is like sheep running for shelter to a bramble bush.

The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.

Steal goods and you’ll go to prison, steal lands and you are a king.

Federal prison, if you get any of it, you're going to have to do 85% of it. And the reason why I called it that is because I had a friend who got sent to the federal joint and his whole... it wasn't about him being in jail. He cried about the 85%.

We are prisoners of ideas.

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.