Quotes

Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Governments have tried to stop crime through punishment throughout the ages, but crime continued in the past punishment remains. Crime can only be stopped through a preventive approach in the schools. You teach the students Transcendental Meditation, and right away they’ll begin using their full brain physiology sensible and they will not get sidetracked into wrong things.

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

Care should be taken that the punishment does not exceed the guilt; and also that some men do not suffer for offenses for which others are not even indicted.

Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.

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.

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

Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.

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

If you share the crime of your friend, you make it your own.

The solution to our drug problem is not in incarceration.

The only difference between me and my fellow actors is that I've spent more time in jail.

In prison, you get the chance to see who really loves you.

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.

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

Prison makes you a better judge of character. You pick up on people much faster.

What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.

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

It is true you cannot eat freedom and you cannot power machinery with democracy. But then neither can political prisoners turn on the light in the cells of a dictatorship.