Quotes

America is the land of the second chance – and when the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life.

Well does Heaven have care that no man secures happiness by crime.

The solution to our drug problem is not in incarceration.

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

We are prisoners of ideas.

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.

While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.

He had drawn many a thousand of these rations in prisons and camps, and though he'd never had an opportunity to weight them on scales, and although, being a man of timid nature, he knew no way of standing up for his rights, he, like every other prisoner, had discovered long ago that honest weight was never to be found in the bread-cutting. There was short weight in every ration. The only point was how short. So every day you took a look to soothe your soul - today, maybe, they haven't snitched any.

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

Since 1957, black people have experienced double-digit unemployment - in good times and bad times. Look at the population of African Americans in prison. They represent more than half the population of prisoners in the country, 55 percent of those on death row.

To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.

When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.

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

We're in a war. People who blast some pot on a casual basis are guilty of treason.

Reality becomes a prison to those who can’t get out of it.

Whatever you think of de Sade, he was a complex figure and we should not look for easy answers with him. He was, strangely perhaps, against the death penalty, and he was never put in prison for murders or anything like that.

Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.

What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor.

A country is in a bad state, which is governed only by laws; because a thousand things occur for which laws cannot provide, and where authority ought to interpose.

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

They took away my money, my family, and my security. Why couldn't they destroy my ideas? We will question them in court tomorrow as we trigger The Revolution of all revolutions!

The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.

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

The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.