Quotes

The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.

Extreme justice is extreme injustice.

Organized crime in America takes in over forty billion dollars a year. This is quite a profitable sum, especially when one considers that the Mafia spends very little for office supplies.

On average, drug prisoners spend more time in federal prison than rapists, who often get out on early release because of the overcrowding in prison caused by the Drug War.

To be at peace in crime! Ah, who can thus flatter himself.

I sometimes wish that people would put a little more emphasis upon the observance of the law than they do upon its enforcement.

The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.

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%.

A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.

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.

Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.

It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.

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.

There is no greater punishment of wickedness that that it is dissatisfied with itself and its deeds.

Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached.

We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business.

The world itself is but a large prison, out of which some are daily led to execution.

In my country we go to prison first and then become President.

You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.

Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a God.

Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.

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.

The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.

A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.

Vices are not crimes.