One crime has to be concealed by another.
Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our duty is to furnish it well.
No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, that can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.
If you want total security, go to prison. There you’re fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking…is freedom.
One man meets an infamous punishment for that crime which confers a diadem upon another.
If you share the crime of your friend, you make it your own.
A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.
A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards, as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.
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.
Do not lay on the multitude the blame that is due to a few.
I never told a victim story about my imprisonment. Instead, I told a transformation story - about how prison changed my outlook, about how I saw that communication, truth, and trust are at the heart of power.
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.
Society has used the juvenile courts to create a caste system where there are throw-away people.
~James Bell
I know not whether laws be right, or whether laws be wrong; All that we know who lie in gaol is that the wall is strong; And that each day is like a year, a year whose days are long.
Wicked deeds are generally done, even with impunity, for the mere desire of occupation.
If we look at Houston, which is a very environmentally toxic place, we find that it has one of the highest levels of young men going to prison and also among the highest levels of illiteracy in the country.
Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?
The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.
Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.
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 object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.
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.
Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.
Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X came out of prison stronger.
Law is merely the expression of the will of the strongest for the time being, and therefore laws have no fixity, but shift from generation to generation.
