Prison Quotes - Page 4

Um, h-h-hi,” Sophie stammered, closing the door behind her. Meeting her gaze were crystal eyes like blue shards of glass.

Jennifer Lane

For the average person leading an ordinary life, fame holds an hypnotic attraction. Many would sooner perish than exist in anonymity. But for the unlucky few who've had notoriety forced upon them, infamy can be a sentence more damning than any prison term

Emily Thorne

I refuse to stay a prisoner to my body. I am going to free myself.

Leigh Hershkovich

Most people spend less time outside than prisoners.

J.R. Rim

During the first day, curious at having outsiders among them, a long stream of inmates came over and talked with me. Remarkably, according to what they told me, nearly every inmate in the prison didn't do it. Several thousand people had been locked up unjustly and, by an incredible coincidence, all in the same prison.On the other hand, they knew an awful lot about how to knife somebody.

Alan Alda

I see now the virtue in madness, for this country knows no law nor any boundary. I pity the poor shades confined to the Euclidean prison that is sanity

Grant Morrison

The term 'deinstitutionalization' conceals some simple truths, namely, that old, unwanted persons, formerly housed in state hospitals, are now housed in nursing homes; that young, unwanted persons, formerly also housed in state hospitals, are now housed in prisons or parapsychiatric facilities; and that both groups of inmates are systematically drugged with psychiatric medications.

Thomas Szasz

Today, over 50 percent of prison and jail inmates in the United States have a diagnosed mental illness, a rate nearly five times greater than that of the general adult population. Nearly one in five prison and jail inmates has a serious mental illness. In fact, there are more than three times the number of seriously mentally ill individuals in jail or prison than in hospitals; in some states that number is ten times. And prison is a terrible place for someone with mental illness or a neurological disorder that prison guards are not trained to understand.

Bryan Stevenson

When a guy goes out there and kills somebody, he might look at himself as the winner. But in truth he’s also a loser, because now he would be lost in the system. If you were listening to the news recently, some people you know well are doing 45, and 64 years for murder. They might have won their fight, but they lost their lives to the system. Franco ‘Co’ Bethel, former gang leader and right hand man to Scrooge.

Drexel Deal

Is it surprising that the cellular prison, with its regular chronologies, forced labour, its authorities of surveillance and registration, its experts in normality, who continue and multiply the functions of the judge, should have become the modern instrument of penality? Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?

Michel Foucault

What if I lose what little control I have left? I may live in a prison now, but at least I know my way around it.

Nicole Deese

Generally speaking, our prisoners were capable of loving animals, and if they had been allowed they would have delighted to rear large numbers of domestic animals and birds in the prison. And I wonder what other activity could better have softened and refined their harsh and brutal natures than this. But it was not allowed. Neither the regulations nor the nature of the prison made it possible.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

An intelligent, energetic, educated woman cannot be kept in four walls — even satin-lined, diamond-studded walls — without discovering sooner or later that they are still a prison

Pearl S. Buck

We could choose to be a nation that extends care, compassion, and concern to those who are locked up and locked out or headed for prison before they are old enough to vote. We could seek for them the same opportunities we seek for our own children; we could treat them like one of “us.” We could do that. Or we can choose to be a nation that shames and blames its most vulnerable, affixes badges of dishonor upon them at young ages, and then relegates them to a permanent second-class status for life. That is the path we have chosen, and it leads to a familiar place.

Michelle Alexander

I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading opened to me. I knew right there, in prison, that reading had changed forever the course of my life. As I see it today, the ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive. I certainly wasn’t seeking any degree, the way a college confers a status symbol upon its students. My home made education gave me, with every additional book that I read, a little bit more sensitivity to the deafness, dumbness, and blindness that was afflicting the black race in America. Not long ago, an English writer telephoned me from London asking questions. One was, “What’s your alma mater?” I told him, “Books.” You will never catch me with a free fifteen minutes in which I’m not studying something I feel might be able to help the black man.

Malcolm X

I do not believe we can stop them, Samori, because they must ultimately stop themselves. And still I urge you to struggle. Struggle for the memory of your ancestors. Struggle for wisdom. Struggle for the warmth of The Mecca. Struggle for your grandmother and grandfather, for your name. But do not struggle for the Dreamers. Hope for them. Pray for them, if you are so moved. But do not pin your struggle on their conversion. The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves, to understand that the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted themselves white, is the deathbed of us all. The Dream is the same habit that endangers this planet, the same habit that sees our bodies stowed away in prisons and ghettos.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

The United States is like one big jail for Black people, because we're locked into a mentality and a mindset that limits our potential. It has us against us.

Chuck D

The genius of the current caste system, and what most distinguishes it from its predecessors, is that it appears voluntary. People choose to commit crimes, and that's why they are locked up or locked out, we are told. This feature makes the politics of responsibility particularly tempting, as it appears the system can be avoided with good behavior. But herein lies the trap. All people make mistakes. All of us are sinners. All of us are criminals. All of us violate the law at some point in our lives. In fact, if the worst thing you have ever done is speed ten miles over the speed limit on the freeway, you have put yourself and others at more risk of harm than someone smoking marijuana in the privacy of his or her living room. Yet there are people in the United States serving life sentences for first-time drug offenses, something virtually unheard of anywhere else in the world.

Michelle Alexander

The relevant question is not whether back then a few extraordinary individuals could overcome a system strongly weighted against them or whether today an admittedly far greater number requiring far less talent can succeed. The real question is whether it's harder for the people in this audience to succeed be they extraordinary, average, or below average. If it is, and I think it obvious that it is, then that's untenable in a country that purports to provide equal opportunity for all. Now of course you'll dispute my claim that it is more difficult to succeed for them. You say the battle's over. I say not only is it not over but you yourself are stationed on the frontline of the battle and have been all these years. This room and the criminal justice system as a whole is the frontline. This is where modern-day segregation lives on.

Sergio de la Pava

If life was fair ... one third of the people would comprise of judges and lawyers ... one third of police and prison officials ... and one third of legislators ... and one third more to make the other three thirds make any sense at all .... Thank goodness for no fair.

Brian Spellman

When I pass the bar, you'll be barred from bars but put behind them.

Natalya Vorobyova

You will never be free until you free yourself from the prison of other people's opinions of you.

Matshona Dhliwayo

The good doctor reassured John these were people who put their psychopathy to good use. They lived productive, well-adjusted lives as surgeons, CEOs and ambulance drivers. The light bulb went on. The CSC [Correctional Service of Canada] doesn't have to go through all these gyrations to reprogram anyone, they just have to find every inmate the right job!

Stephen Reid

Amador and Bianca have a great life that I'm only a little jealous of. They have two kids they bring to see me. His daughter, Ashlee, is almost five now. She has asked me to marry her when I get out. It feels kind of weird since she calls me Uncle Reyes and incest is frowned upon, but who am I to argue with true love?

Darynda Jones

Farragut's first visitor was his wife. He was raking leaves in yard Y when the PA said that 734-508-32 had a visitor. He jogged up the road past the firehouse and into the tunnel. It was four flights up to cellblock F. "Visitor," he said to Walton, who let him into his cell. He kept his white shirt prepared for visits. It was dusty. He washed his face and combed his hair with water. "Don't take nuttin but a handkerchief," said the guard. "I know, I know, I know...." Down he went to the door of the visitor's room, where he was frisked. Through the glass he saw that his visitor was Marcia.There were no bars in the visitor's room, but the glass windows were chicken-wired and open only at the top. A skinny cat couldn't get in or out, but the sounds of the prison moved in freely on the breeze. She would, he knew, have passed three sets of bars - clang, clang, clang - and waited in an anteroom where there were pews or benches, soft-drink engines and a display of the convict's art with prices stuck in the frames. None of the cons could paint, but you could always count on some wet-brain to buy a vase of roses or a marine sunset if he had been told that the artist was a lifer. There were no pictures on the walls of the visitor's room but there were four signs that said: NO SMOKING, NO WRITING, NO EXCHANGE OF OBJECTS, VISITORS ARE ALLOWED ONE KISS.

John Cheever

It's hard to say goodbye for good at any time or any place. It's harder still to say it through a meshed wire. It crisscrossed his face into little diagonals, gave me only little broken-up molecules of it at a time. It stenciled a cold, rigid frame around every kiss.

Cornell Woolrich

In American prisons, which are extraordinarily violent places, the most vicious form of punishment is simply to lock a person in an empty room for years with absolutely nothing to do. This emptying of any possibility of communication or meaning is the real essence of what violence really is or does.

David Graeber

Violence is already active here; it is built into the very structure od the existing society. If we seek a world in which men do the least possible violence to each other (which is to state just the negative of it), then we are committed not simply to try to avoid violence ourselves, but to try to destroy patterns of violence which already exist.

Barbara Deming

Everyone in prison has an ideal of violence, murder. Beneath all relationships between prisoners is the ever-present fact of murder. It ultimately defines our relationship among ourselves.

Jack Henry Abbott

Is it always in the interest of the public safety to seek the prosecutor's traditional solution -- the harshest penalty possible? Or is the public best served by finding ways to change a kid's lot in life for the better, even if that means opening the prison door?

Edward Humes

Take a trip in my mindsee all that I've seen,and you'd be called abeast, not a human being...Fuck it, cause there'snot much I can do,there's no way out, myscreams have no voice nomatter how loud I shout...I could be called alow life, but life ain'tas low as me. I'm in juvenile hall headedfor the penitentiary. George Trevino, sixteen, "Who Am I?

Edward Humes

It's not like they can take anything from me,' he says later, back with his homeboys in Juvenile Hall. 'Ain't got nothing to give. Nothin' but time, that is. And I been doin' time my whole life, one way or the other.

Edward Humes

Locking everyone up is not the solution,' she sighs, staring into a cup of coffee gone cold as The Box at Juvenile Hall. 'It's just the symptom of the problem. It's the proof that we're doing something wrong.

Edward Humes

He wants to tell her that he is not hopeless, that he is not filled with hatred or violence, that he is not a number, a 300 or 600 or any hundred, but just a kid with no one and nothing, and who would do anything to make it otherwise. Just tell me how, he wants to scream. He wants to tell her what it's like to have the same dream night after night, that he's playing tag with his little sister, laughing, happy - then waking up and not knowing if the image in his head is a dim memory, or just something his mind cooked up to fill the black hole. Do you know what it's like to have no past? he wants to ask. And behind it all, like a ringing in his ears, is the question that really nags at him all the time, the one that has haunted him since he was six years old and his family evaporated. He wants to ask it, then and there and for good: What did I do wrong back then? What did I do to deserve this life?

Edward Humes

the fundamental question Juvenile Court was designed to ask - What's the best way to deal with this individual kid? - is often lost in the process, replaced by a point system that opens the door, or locks it, depending on the qualities of the crime, not the child.

Edward Humes

The preachers and lecturers deal with men of straw, as they are men of straw themselves. Why, a free-spoken man, of sound lungs, cannot draw a long breath without causing your rotten institutions to come toppling down by the vacuum he makes. Your church is a baby-house made of blocks, and so of the state....The church, the state, the school, the magazine, think they are liberal and free! It is the freedom of a prison-yard.

Henry David Thoreau

They found him guilty, and brother, if Maine had the death penalty, he would have done the airdance before that spring's crocuses poked their heads out of the dirt.

Stephen King

Speaking of banging, when’s McSailor getting home?” Kirsten’s smirk was the size of Texas.Sophie had to smile. “Crude. You’re crude, roomie.

Jennifer Lane

Her recoil confirmed the disgust Grant felt inside. Who was he kidding, trying to put Vladimir and Andrei behind bars? He was no different from his father. Then he remembered Sophie’s

Jennifer Lane

Grant glanced down at his khaki jacket. Since he’d slipped on the US Navy uniform in Agent Bounter’s office, he’d felt a confident swagger possess him. His spine lengthened, and his shoulders retracted. He should’ve been wearing this every day, not the stupid dress shirt and slacks of a lounge singer.

Jennifer Lane

Okay, I’ve got the hidden microphones with GPS here,” Agent Bounter said. “Let’s get one on you.”“Now, sir?” “The Russians are on the radar. It’s time.”As Bounter turned to pick up the tiny button-size microphone, Grant clenched his hands into fists, his anticipation bui

Jennifer Lane

He pulled her toward him and gathered her in his arms as his hand lovingly cradled the back of her neck. She stopped breathing as he leaned down—ohmigod, the Adonis was about to kiss her—and planted the softest, most sensual kiss on her lips.Time stood still on the busy Chicago street.

Jennifer Lane

Sometimes I feel like a normal person. Sometimes I forget I’m on parole, that I’m not really free.

Jennifer Lane

HAVING NEVER taken a decent holiday before, I decided on a trip to Thailand, booked a flight and flew out the following week. Mate, I loved it. The friendly people, the food, the females!

Simon Palmer

I noticed some scratch marks and faded blood stains high up on a wall. “What happened there?”“An inmate must have tried to escape. I saw a guy use two suction devices like the ones used to carry glass sheets to help lever himself up. He reached half way before being spotted by a blue shirt.”“What happened to him?”“The blue shirt called a guard. He was ordered to come down, but didn’t. They shot him in the leg, he fell and later in the cell, he removed a blade from a disposable razor, slashed his left wrist then wrote a suicide note on the wall with his right hand – in his own blood. Suicide is really common in here and nobody bats an eyelid.

Simon Palmer

In terms of having an experience, seriously contemplating a murder was almost as good as going through with it, and it had the added benefit of not entailing risk. Between prison and no prison, no prison was clearly preferable.

Jonathan Franzen

And that was when it really came home to me what I was about to do. I was going to rob a bank, committing the additional crime of arson in the process, and if I got caught I'd go to prison.Well, I thought, go on selling second-hand jalopies for another forty years and maybe somebody'll give you a testimonial and a forty-dollar watch.

Charles Williams

She is shocked by the rows of thick Plexiglas windows, each equipped with a telephone, each with a prisoner on one side and an outsider on the other. There is a teenage girl chatting with a prisoner who is presumably her father. There’s a married couple talking to their daughter. There’s a woman with a baby in her arms, sobbing into her phone as she begs her husband not to plead guilty for his crimes. Jail is terrifying to Geraldine, not only because it’s a house of criminals but also because it’s a cold slap in the face, a reminder of where she will eventually end up. “You’ve got to stay with me the whole time, Callo! I’m serious, you CANNOT leave me here.”“I’ll never,” Callo vows, but he’s eyeing her strangely. “Just remember which side of the glass you’re on right now, Geraldine.

Rebecca McNutt

He who has never tasted jail Lives well within the legal pale, While he who's served a heavy sentence Renews the racket, not repentance.

Ogden Nash

The world is a prison in which solitary confinement is preferable.

Karl Kraus

rip the prisonsopenput theconvictsontelevision

Norman Mailer

Don't let people supervise your life, If you know who you are, you shouldn't be living in that prison of dominance, live by your orders, you are your own soldier.

Michael Bassey Johnson

Once in jail or you just go in prison for a reason you don't have rights... So be wise, think twice and don't go there!

Deyth Banger

This was my first time in Govan. You could smell and taste the thick smog in the air. The Blue Triangle was a new high-tech building, and it didn’t look right standing there in front of older and more historical buildings. The Blue Triangle may have looked great from the outside, but once inside, to my horror, it was full of young teenage boys and girls full of deep and dark depression

Stephen Richards

I want to say before I go on that I have never previously told anyone my sordid past in detail. I haven't done it now to sound as though I might be proud of how bad, how evil, I was.But people are always speculating-why am I as I am? To understand that of any person, his whole life, from birth, must be reviewed. All of our experiences fuse into our personality. Everything that ever happened to us is an ingredient.Today, when everything that I do has an urgency, I would not spend one hour in the preparation of a book which had the ambition to perhaps titillate some readers. But I am spending many hoursbecause the full story is the best way that I know to have it seen, and understood, that I had sunk to the very bottom of the American white man's society when-soon now, in prison-I found Allah and the religion of Islam and it completely transformed my life.

Malcolm X

When the meat platter was passed to me, I didn't even know what the meat was; usually, you couldn't tell, anyway-but it was suddenly as though _don't eat any more pork_ flashed on a screen before me.I hesitated, with the platter in mid-air; then I passed it along to the inmate waiting next to me. He began serving himself; abruptly, he stopped. I remember him turning, looking surprised at me.I said to him, "I don't eat pork."The platter then kept on down the table.It was the funniest thing, the reaction, and the way that it spread. In prison, where so little breaks the monotonous routine, the smallest thing causes a commotion of talk. It was being mentioned all over the cell block by night that Satan didn't eat pork.

Malcolm X

Half the published articles on Gaza contain a standard reference to its resemblance to a vast open-air prison (and when I last saw it under Israeli occupation it certainly did deserve this metaphor). The problem is that, given its ideology and its allies, Hamas qualifies rather too well in the capacity of guard and warder.

Christopher Hitchens

Not every one of us are born or made free of our own prisons to the extent of ourselves.

M.F. Moonzajer

After six long hours of driving and three rest stops, Tiger pulls up to a snow-topped, metal speaker box just outside the State Penitentiary's first gate in Walla Walla. As he rolls down his window and snow flies in his face, Joshua starts begging for a Happy Meal.I turn around, snapping at him. "This ISN'T MCDONALDS and YOU AREN'T HUNGRY. NOW SHUT UP BRAT."A loud scratchy masculine voice blasts out of the speaker. "CAN I HELP YOU?"Tiger leans out the window, as he answers- We're here to visit Raven Chandler."HAVE YOU BEEN HERE BEFORE?""Yes sir. I've been here A LOT." "WHERE'S HIS MOTHER?""I don't know.. I haven't seen her in months.""NOT THE PRISONER'S MOTHER. THE BRAT IN THE BACK SEAT OF YOUR JEEP.""Oh- HIM-" As he turns, smiling and sticking his tongue out at Joshua, I lean towards his window to answer the guard's question. "SHE'S IN VEGAS, SIR. I'M BABYSITTING. HE'S MY GODSON." When the speaker remains disturbingly silent for far too long, I continue. "HE'S A GOOD BOY SIR. HE WON'T BE ANY TROUBLE- I SWEAR." "THAT'S RIGHT," Tiger said. "HE SWEARS ON THE LITTLE BRAT'S MOTHER'S GRAVE.

Giorge Leedy

You spend a lot of time thinking about how awful the prison is rather than envisioning your future.

Piper Kernan

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Prison Quotes - Page 4

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