Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.
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.
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.
Vices are not crimes.
We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business.
Prison, dungeons, blessed places where evil is impossible because they are the crossroads of all the evil in the world. One cannot commit evil in hell.
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.
In prison, you get the chance to see who really loves you.
We're in a war. People who blast some pot on a casual basis are guilty of treason.
Adversities such as being homeless and going to prison has made many people stronger.
History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.
The world itself is but a large prison, out of which some are daily led to execution.
Hanging was the worst use a man could be put to.
If you strike at, imprison, or kill us, out of our prisons or graves we will still evoke a spirit that will thwart you, and perhaps, raise a force that will destroy you! We defy you! Do your worst!
Do not lay on the multitude the blame that is due to a few.
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.
The severest justice may not always be the best policy.
It is hard, but it is excellent, to find the right knowledge of when correction is necessary and when grace doth most avail.
When it comes to freedom, we are but prisoners of our own desires.
Steal goods and you’ll go to prison, steal lands and you are a king.
They were being driven to a prison, through no fault of their own, in all probability for life. In comparison, how much easier it would be to walk to the gallows than to this tomb of living horrors!
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
Every crime has, in the moment of its perpetration, Its own avenging angel--dark misgiving, An ominous sinking at the inmost heart.
It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.
