Quotes

Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.

When it comes to freedom, we are but prisoners of our own desires.

When you are younger you get blamed for crimes you never committed and when you're older you begin to get credit for virtues you never possessed. It evens itself out.

It is safer that a bad man should not be accused, than that he should be acquitted.

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

The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.

Here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to be to restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work.

Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.

Experts and the educated elite have replaced what worked with what sounded good. Society was far more civilized before they took over our schools, prisons, welfare programs, police departments and courts. It's high time we ran these people out of our lives and went back to common sense.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

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

Fast closed with double grills
And triple gates – the cell
To wicked souls is hell;
But to a mind that's innocent
'Tis only iron, wood and stone.

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

Do not lay on the multitude the blame that is due to a few.

Trial by jury itself, instead of being a security to persons who are accused, shall be a delusion, a mockery, and a snare.

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

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.

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 have initiated programs for re-entry offenders, since some 500,000 to 600,000 offenders will come out of prison each year for the next three or four years. We want to have positive alternatives when they come back to the community.

No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.

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.

A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.

When is conduct a crime, and when is a crime not a crime? When Somebody Up There -- a monarch, a dictator, a Pope, a legislator -- so decrees.

They were being driven to a prison, through no fault of their own, in all probability for life. In comparison, how much easier it would be to walk to the gallows than to this tomb of living horrors!