On average, drug prisoners spend more time in federal prison than rapists, who often get out on early release because of the overcrowding in prison caused by the Drug War.
The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.
It is hard, but it is excellent, to find the right knowledge of when correction is necessary and when grace doth most avail.
The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.
I can tell you this on a stack of Bibles: prisons are archaic, brutal, unregenerative, overcrowded hell holes where the inmates are treated like animals with absolutely not one humane thought given to what they are going to do once they are released. You're an animal in a cage and you're treated like one.
I can work for the Lord in or out of prison.
In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.
We who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments.
Taught from infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.
Any punishment that does not correct, that can merely rouse rebellion in whoever has to endure it, is a piece of gratuitous infamy which makes those who impose it more guilty in the eyes of humanity, good sense and reason, nay a hundred times more guilty than the victim on whom the punishment is inflicted.
The world itself is but a large prison, out of which some are daily led to execution.
Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.
While crime is punished it yet increases.
Shyness is the prison of the heart.
I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.
I just remember that disturbing feeling of walking into that prison, the complete loss of privacy, the complete loss of stimulation, dignity.
Money will determine whether the accused goes to prison or walks out of the courtroom a free man.
Some laws of state aimed at curbing crime are even more criminal.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.
On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break.
As we grow in wisdom, we pardon more freely.
Crime is a logical extension of the sort of behavior that often [is] considered perfectly respectable in legitimate business.
To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.
No crime has been without a precedent.
