Quotes

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

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

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.

Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts.

Well does Heaven have care that no man secures happiness by crime.

To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.

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.

A sick person is a prisoner.

Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.

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

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

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.

The mellow sweetness of pumpkin pie off a prison spoon is something you will never forget.

Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.

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

It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.

Women have worked hard; starved in prison; given of their time and lives that we might sit in the House of Commons and take part in the legislating of this country.

It is not at the table, but in prison, that you learn who your true friends are.

Since 1957, black people have experienced double-digit unemployment - in good times and bad times. Look at the population of African Americans in prison. They represent more than half the population of prisoners in the country, 55 percent of those on death row.

Extreme justice is extreme injustice.

Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.

A variety in punishment is of utility, as well as a proportion.

There is a point at which even justice does injury.

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

I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice.