I just remember that disturbing feeling of walking into that prison, the complete loss of privacy, the complete loss of stimulation, dignity.
The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.
Pardon is the virtue of victory.
I have been studying how I may compare This prison where I live unto the world; And, for because the world is populous, And here is not a creature but myself, I cannot do it. Yet I'll hammer it out.
Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached.
Virtue pardons the wicked, as the sandal-tree perfumes the axe which strikes it.
Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.
The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
Justice renders to every one his due.
Concepts of justice must have hands and feet to carry out justice in every case in the shortest possible time and the lowest possible cost. That is the challenge to every lawyer and judge in America.
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!
Faults of the head are punished in this world, those of the heart in another; but as most of our vices are compound, so also is their punishment.
Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.
Prison makes you a better judge of character. You pick up on people much faster.
While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.
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.
No crime has been without a precedent.
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.
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.
Some laws of state aimed at curbing crime are even more criminal.
Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.
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.
It is impossible to go through life without trust: That is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.
The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.
I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up...I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through, before they could get to be as free as I was.
