Quotes

Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.

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

Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.

It is certain that the study of human psychology, if it were undertaken exclusively in prisons, would also lead to misrepresentation and absurd generalizations.

I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.

To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.

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.

The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.

Hanging was the worst use a man could be put to.

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

Money will determine whether the accused goes to prison or walks out of the courtroom a free man.

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.

The only effect of public punishment is to show the rabble how bravely it can be borne; and that every one who hath lost a toe-nail hath suffered worse.

Three hundred years ago a prisoner condemned to the Tower of London carved on the wall of his cell this sentiment to keep up his spirits during his long imprisonment: “It is not adversity that kills, but the impatience with which we bear adversity.”

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, dungeons, blessed places where evil is impossible because they are the crossroads of all the evil in the world. One cannot commit evil in hell.

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

One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.

Governments have tried to stop crime through punishment throughout the ages, but crime continued in the past punishment remains. Crime can only be stopped through a preventive approach in the schools. You teach the students Transcendental Meditation, and right away they’ll begin using their full brain physiology sensible and they will not get sidetracked into wrong things.

I was put into jail as I was going to the shoemaker's to get a shoe which was mended. When I was let out the next morning, I proceeded to finish my errand, and, having put on my mended shoe, joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct; and in half an hour -- for the horse was soon tackled -- was in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off, and then the State was nowhere to be seen.

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

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.

The solution to our drug problem is not in incarceration.

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