Prison Quotes

I know not whether laws be right Or whether laws be wrong All that we know who lie in gaol Is that the wall is strong And that each day is like a year A year whose days are long.

Oscar Wilde

Stone walls do not a prison make Nor iron bars a cage Minds innocent and quiet take That for an hermitage.

Richard Lovelace

In durance vile here must I wake and weep And all my frowsy couch in sorrow steep.

James Drummond Burns

While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.

George Bernard Shaw

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly the true place for a just man is also a prison.

Henry David Thoreau

I know not whether laws be right Or whether laws be wrong All that we know who lie in gaol Is that the wall is strong And that each day is like a year A year whose days are long.

Oscar Wilde

In seeking to severely penalize criminals society by putting the criminals away behind safe walls actually provide them with the means of greater strength for future atrocities glorious and otherwise.

Jack Kerouac

You’re scaring the dog,” Trish pointed out. She rarely called me by name. They do that inprisoner of war camps, I’ve heard. Depersonalization.

Garth Stein

Put two macho groups together and give the first desperation and numbers, and the second truncheons and protective clothing, and the result is like a laboratory civil war.

Alexander Masters

There is but an inch of difference between the cushioned chamber and the padded cell.

G.K. Chesterton

[Solitary confinement] is terrible. That is terrible. You're in a grave. You can't do anything. Everything's brought to you and you're in a room all day, except to come out of the showers. So when I would come out, I would entertain myself by singing, doing little mock concerts. And then when I was in the room, I would develop a routine. Like I have a lot of hair under here, so I would take my hair down and take all day to braid it on purpose. Stretch the hours out. Then I might write. And I would clean the floor. And I would look out the window. And then I'd devote a whole day to just reading. I was Christian then, trying to be. So I would read the whole Bible. I would break it down into sections. You're in a grave and you're trying to live. That's how to best describe it: trying to live in a grave. You're trying to live 'cause you're not dead yet, but nobody hears you when you call out, 'Hey, I'm alive!

Megan Sweeney

Mr Moss's courtyard is railed in like a cage, lest the gentlemen who are boarding with him should take a fancy to escape from his hospitality.

William Makepeace Thackeray

If he's a poet, why's he in jail?" demanded a suspicious voice. Madam Chairwoman shrugged velvet shoulders. "Perhaps he writes free verse," she suggested cunningly. A stir of approval answered her. Mice are all for people being free, so that they too can be freed form their eternal task of cheering prisoners--so that they can stay snug at home, nibbling the family cheese, instead of sleeping out in damp straw on a diet of stale bread.

Margery Sharp

After a week he was moved to a different wing and into a shared six-by-eight with a grizzled old con called Alf. He had faded tattoos that stained most of the visible skin on his hands, arms and neck a dull blue, sharp eyes and a thick beard that made his mouth look like an axe wound on a bear.

R.D. Ronald

Prisons are built to break men, and when men are broken society has consummated its revenge

Jan Valtin

the black man today will only find solitude in one place: prison. ironically, he becomes most free while incarcerated.

Darnell Lamont Walker

The cells smell is a great feature of French prisons. Ours in No.44 was one of those fine broad-shouldered up and coming young smells, which stand on both feet and look the world in the eye. We became very fond and proud of it.

P.G. Wodehouse

Golden bars make no less a prisonthan a coffin on a hill.And in caged reformation,one wanders aimless still.The rafters now a recollectionof sacred suppression.How the morning dawnstrikes mourning confession.Now Death yields a harvestof the living masses.We walk toward its pathno earthly power surpasses.

Craig Froman

When you are born into bondage you can't see the prison.

Bryant McGill

The County Jail looked like a tall, forbidding elementary school. Seven stories of dirty brown brick, one hundred years old and now operating at 330 percent of capacity.

Richard Price

No matter how well meaning and astute the investigators are or how well-researched, witnessed and documented the incidents of cruelty are, a prison is a prison is a prison. The structure of authority that produces the oppressed and the oppressor alike is the key to understanding the problem. Contained within this structure is the authoritative power to agendize language, which is simply another control mechanism.

Gayle K. Horii

No sun cream or condoms, just in case you’re looking at the lady-boys. There’s plenty of AIDS lingering about and every STD you can imagine.

Simon Palmer

The world is a prison for the believer and paradise for a non-believer.

Anonymous

I like visiting people in prison. I can say whatever I want to them, and they can’t do anything about it.

Brandon Sanderson

Brightlord Adolin insisted. So long as you were in here, he wouldn't leave. We tried to stop him, but the man’s a prince. We can’t storming make him do anything, not even leave. He locked himself away in the cell and we just had to live with it.

Brandon Sanderson

I mean, what is prison, really, except a good bar without the liquor?

John Waters

I want to release my soul from its prison cell, to silence the guards who tell me that I am not capable of living. Every voice that ever told me that I cannot achieve has, at this moment, become silenced. This cell is no longer my home.

Leigh Hershkovich

Let me out Aphador.' Penteluck said smoothly.'So you can attempt to run away, I think not.

Keisha Keenleyside

Formerly these harsh cells in which the discipline of the prison leaves the condemned to himself were composed of four stone walls, a ceiling of stone, a pavement of tiles, a camp bed, a grated air-hole, a double iron door, and were called "dungeons" ; but the dungeon has been thought too horrible; now it is composed ofan iron door, a grated air-hole, a camp bed, a pavement of tiles, a ceiling of stone, four stone walls, and it is called "punishment cell.

Victor Hugo

I am afraid the greatest prison that people live in is the fear what other people think... Grow up & lose the fear.

Ziad K. Abdelnour

The damn vermin are so numerous that I am afraid to sneeze, for fear the damned lice would regard it as gong for dinner, and eat me up - Robert Cobb Kennedy

Tobin T. Buhk

They did not use the sonic stunners but the foray gun, the ancient weapon that fires a set of metal fragments in a burst. They shot to kill him. He was dying when I got to him, sprawled and twisted away from his skis that stuck up out of the snow, his chest half shot away. I took his head in my arms and spoke to him, but he never answered me; only in a way he answered my love for him, crying out through the silent wreck and tumult of his mind as consciousness lapsed, in the unspoken tongue, once, clearly, 'Arek!' Then no more. I held him, crouching there in the snow, while he died. They let me do that. Then they made me get up, and took me off one way and him another, I going to prison and he into the dark.

Ursula K Le Guin

Put 'em who threaten possessions and power together with 'em who offend our tastes in sex and dope. Those who're touched, put 'em in asylums. Pack off old ones to 'senior communities,' nursing homes. Our children? Keep'em prisoner, baby-sitter as warden. School? Good for fifteen to twenty years. Army afterward. Liberated, we live in prison. No this, no that. Kill us before we die!

John Cage

Thinking Reports enable the prisoners to wash their brains, and become new!" he announced cheerfully. "Washing the brain is very important to your reform, and improving your real situation.

Dominic Stevenson

We have a racially based justice system that overpunishes, fails to rehabilitate, and doesn't make us safer.

Piper Kerman

These men are in prison: that is the Outsider’s verdict. They are quite contented in prison—caged animals who have never known freedom; but it is prison all the same. And the Outsider? He is in prison too: nearly every Outsider in this book has told us so in a different language; but he knows it. His desire is to escape. But a prison-break is not an easy matter; you must know all about your prison, otherwise you might spend years in tunnelling, like the Abbe in The Count of Monte Cristo, and only find yourself in the next cell.

Colin Wilson

We should never forget that everything Adolph Hitler did in Germany was "legal" and everything the Hungarian freedom fighers did in Hungary was "illegal." It was "illegal" to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler's Germany.

Martin Luther King Jr.

You did it! You are free!!!!!!!!

Paige Garland

Were you in love with Emma?" I ask."I was hard-core obsessed," he says without thinking about it. "Not in love." "What's the difference?"He's about to throw a stone at ta yard light but stops. "Prison," he says, and puts the stone in his pocket.

Cath Crowley

That’s the ironic thing about time, Doc. One the one hand, we don’t have much of it for this, but it’s all I have in here.

Kenneth Eade

Freedom comes with a price while bondage takes hold without notice

Mark L. Baynard

You have to remember, William. It may make the difference between freedom and half a lifetime in prison.

Kenneth Eade

Whattaya mean you ain’t no criminal lawyer? You a lawyer right? And you in here, that means you also a criminal.

Kenneth Eade

I was up really early. It was the day of my selection tests and interviews to become a Prison Officer. The recruitment process was an absolute joke ... Everyone could have travelled round the world seven fucking times before they hear[d] back from the Service's recruitment cowboys.

Ronnie Thompson

There is a tremendous amount of farting in prison.

Charlie Engle

I thought that exile meant you had to leave your country and you could go anywhere--somewhere in the sun, a tropical island, say, or America. But exile doesn't mean that; it means you are banished to a specific place, and guess what, that place isn't in the sun and is no paradise, it's not even America. It's some cold, miserable place like Siberia, where you don't know anyone and you can barely survive. It's another prison.

Sally Green

In prison, you learn to count each day and each moment. You even count the bad 'meals' and the unbearable ones.

Abdullah Abu Snaineh

Don't forget either, you unhappy man, that voluntary confinement is a great deal harder to bear than compulsory.

Anton Chekhov

That is just what life is when it is beautiful and happy - a game! Naturally, one can also do all kinds of other things with it, make a duty of it, or a battleground, or a prison, but that does not make it any prettier...

Hermann Hesse

Truth shrilled in prison or cemetary.

Toba Beta

All the studies and all the research in the field of criminology affirm that prison education is the least expensive and most effective solution to overcrowding and strain on the budget caused by recevidism.

Christopher Zoukis

[Lord Horror] was so unique and radical, I expected to go to prison for it. I always thought that if you wrote a truly dangerous book -- something dangerous would happen to you. Which is one reason there are so few really dangerous books around. Publishers play at promoting dangerous books, whether they're Serpent's Tail or Penguin. All you get is a book vetted by committee, never anything radically imaginative or offensive that will take your fucking head off. Ironically, I think it would do other authors a power of good if they had to account for their books by going to prison -- there are far too many bad books being published!

David Britton

I know a little bit about trying to do the right thing and fucking up completely." I added."You talking about mom?" Ben said"I was talking about me.""You could have been talking about all of us. Ben pressed his hand against the glass and my brother and I matched palms.

Gillian Flynn

Great institutions have leaders who are proud of what they do, and who engage with everyone who makes up those institutions, so each person understands their role. But our jailers are generally granted near-total anonymity, like the cartoon executioner who wears a hood to conceal his identity. What is the point, what is the reason, to lock people away for years, when it seems to mean so very little, even to the jailers who hold the key? How can a prisoner understand their punishment to have been worthwhile to anyone, when it's dealt in a way so offhand and indifferent?

Piper Kerman

When you spend your life taking care of mudmen, you can't help getting a little dirty yourself.

Stephen King

When a friend of mine boasted about living in a gated community, I thought he meant Folsom, and I wondered whether he knew Charles Manson.

Ron Brackin

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Prison Quotes

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