Quotes

Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.

The perfection of a thing consists in its essence; there are perfect criminals, as there are men of perfect probity.

Virtue pardons the wicked, as the sandal-tree perfumes the axe which strikes it.

Crimes generally punish themselves.

We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.

It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.

There are dreadful punishments enacted against thieves; but it were much better to make such good provisions, by which every man might be put in a method how to live, and so to be preserved from the fatal necessity of stealing and dying for it.

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.

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 asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.

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.

Organized crime in America takes in over forty billion dollars a year. This is quite a profitable sum, especially when one considers that the Mafia spends very little for office supplies.

The difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion is the thickness of a prison walls.

The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.

One crime is everything; two nothing.

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

I can work for the Lord in or out of prison.

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

Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.

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

Show me the prison, Show me the jail, Show me the prisoner whose life has gone stale. And I'll show you a young man with so many reasons why And there, but for fortune, go you or I.

Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future lives and crimes to society.

The torment of human frustration, whatever its immediate cause, is the knowledge that the self is in prison, its vital force and 'mangled mind' leaking away in lonely, wasteful self-conflict.

No crime has been without a precedent.

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.