Quotes

History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.

Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.

Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.

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.

He was a first-time nonviolent possible offender, ... And under the mandatory minimums, he was put in prison for 15 years. Not only does the punishment not fit the crime, but the mandatory minimums don't give judges any discretion to look at the background of the case, to read into the specifics of the case. I don't know a judge who really is in favor of the mandatory minimums.

Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a God.

Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.

Before we can diminish our sufferings from the ill-controlled aggressive assaults of fellow citizens, we must renounce the philosophy of punishment, the obsolete, vengeful penal attitude. In its place we would seek a comprehensive, constructive social attitude - therapeutic in some instances, restraining in some instances, but preventive in its total social impact. In the last analysis this becomes a question of personal morals and values. No matter how glorified or how piously disguised, vengeance as a human motive must be personally repudiated by each and every one of us.

The contagion of crime is like that of the plague. Criminals collected together corrupt each other; they are worse than ever when at the termination of their punishment they re-enter society.

When it comes to freedom, we are but prisoners of our own desires.

Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.

Written laws are like spiders' webs, and will, like them, only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful will easily break through them.

A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.

A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.

I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.

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.

I existed in a world that never is - the prison of the mind.

Women now have choices. They can be married, not married, have a job, not have a job, be married with children, unmarried with children. Men have the same choice we've always had: work, or prison.

The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.

Steal goods and you’ll go to prison, steal lands and you are a king.

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.

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

He who profits by a crime commits it.

It is impossible to go through life without trust: That is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.

If we look at Houston, which is a very environmentally toxic place, we find that it has one of the highest levels of young men going to prison and also among the highest levels of illiteracy in the country.