Quotes

Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.

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.

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.

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

And while God had work for Paul, he found him friends both in court and prison. Let persecutors send saints to prison, God can provide a keeper for their turn.

Punishment, that is the justice for the unjust.

The world is a prison in which solitary confinement is preferable.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

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.

The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.

I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.

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.

There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.

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.

Crime is a logical extension of the sort of behavior that often [is] considered perfectly respectable in legitimate business.

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.”

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.

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

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

Fear can be like a prison. It is, however, a self made prison. Many are imprisoned by fear. No one else can liberate them from this prison. Others may inspire them but they must liberate themselves.

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.

Crime succeeds by sudden despatch; honest counsels gain vigor by delay.

Man is condemned to be free.

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