Rick Ross Quotes

I am fed up with a system which busts the pot smoker and lets the big dope racketeer go free.

Today more Americans are imprisoned for drug offenses than for property crimes.

I had never believed that I would go to jail.

We can't offer young blacks a job at Wendy's or McDonald's as an alternative to selling crack.

Should someone go to jail for just doing drugs? I believe the time has come for that to end.

Too many whites are getting away with drug use...Too many whites are getting away with drug sales...The answer is to go out and find the ones who are getting away with it, convict them and send them up the river, too.

Penalties against drug use should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself. Nowhere is this more clear than in the laws against the possession of marijuana in private for personal use.

[We have to make] a distinction between dangerous violent criminals and people who are engaged in non-violent criminal activities….Your taking somebody out of the economy, breaking up their families, and putting them in a place with hardened criminals. I think that it is pretty hard to argue that has been a positive long-term result.

Criminals know that if they stay under certain thresholds, nobody is going to come after them.

Every day, lax sentencing costs lives.

If people are violating the law by doing drugs, they ought to be accused and they ought to be convicted and they ought to be sent up.

You know, if you’re caught with an ounce of cocaine, the chances are good you’re going to go to jail. If it happens repeatedly, you may go to jail for the rest of your life. But evidently, if you launder nearly a billion dollars for drug cartels and violate our international sanctions, your company pays a fine and you go home and sleep in your own bed at night, every single individual associated with this. I think that’s fundamentally wrong.

Paris Hilton got 45 days in jail. A lot of people were upset about this - they were hoping for the death penalty.

You got a million drug laws now because the bosses figured there was more money in putting people in jail than taxing something anyone can grow on a window sill.

I was against felonies when a misdemeanor would do.

A Pennsylvania woman convicted for shoplifting was sentenced to wear a badge that reads "Convicted Shoplifter." However, her lawyers hope to plea bargain down to a bumper sticker reading "I'd Rather Be Stealing!.

It had long been true, and prisoners knew this better than anyone, that the poorer you were the more likely you were to end up in jail. This was not just because the poor committed more crimes. In fact, they did. The rich did not have to commit crimes to get what they wanted; the laws were on their side. But when the rich did commit crimes, they often were not prosecuted, and if they were they could get out on bail, hire clever lawyers, get better treatment from judges. Somehow, the jails ended up full of poor black people.

I had gone to jail, but I wasn't gettin' locked up for drugs then. I was gettin' locked up for guns. My moms kept finding guns and stuff in my room and she was gettin' more scared.

We are imprisoning or giving jail sentences to young people who are smoking marijuana.

This is serious, if Martha gets the maximum sentence on all counts, she could serve 20 years in prison. Of course, you have to take off time off for good behavior, which means 20 years in prison.

The average prison term for a convicted murderer in America is 6.5 years. The average tenure for a member of Congress is 13 years. We've got it backwards. We are giving early release to the wrong criminal class.

People charged with drug offenses, though, are typically poor people of color. They are routinely charged with felonies and sent to prison.

Our prison population quintupled in a thirty year period of time. Not doubled or tripled - quintupled. We went from a prison and jail population of about 300,000 to now more than 2 million.

I said something idiotic like, as [William] Shakespeare says, "Action is eloquence," and the judge just frowned at me and gave me a couple weeks in jail.