Quotes About Prison

Between 1995 and 2005, the prison population grew by 30 percent, meaning an additional half million criminals were behind bars, rather than lurking in dark alleys with switchblades. You can well imagine liberals' surprise when the crime rate went down as more criminals were put in prison. The New York Times was reduced to running querulous articles with headlines like Number in Prison Grows Despite Crime Reduction and As Crime Rate Drops, the Prison Rate Rises and the Debate Rages.

The thing is, Guantánamo is also a naval base, and they're under the delusion - especially the people on the naval side who are not dealing with the prison - that they can just pretend this is an ordinary Caribbean naval base. For them, it's: "Why are you making such a big deal out of the most notorious prison in the world?" It's like if people living near Buchenwald said they wanted to talk about the other lovely things in the region besides the camp.

Why did the regime put me in prison in the first place? I was put in prison for six years and it has been all illegal.

A lot of people who go into prison go into prison straight - and when they come out, they're gay.

It was only when I lay there on the rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not between states nor between social classes nor between political parties, but right through every human heart, through all human hearts. And that is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me, bless you, prison, for having been a part of my life.

We have to change public perception of ex-convicts. Most Canadians don't realize that when you come out of prison, you're a complete pariah. You can't get a car loan or money from a bank to start a business. So most end up back in prison within 24 months. It's just so wrong. We need to fix this problem.

A Jesus had to be crucified because he was an alive man. He must have called in his childhood, "Jesus, don't be befooled by others." And he was not befooled, so others had to crucify him, because he was not part of the game. Socrates had to be poisoned and killed, Mansoor had to be murdered. These are people who have escaped from the prison, and whatsoever you say you cannot persuade them to come back. They will not come into the prison. They have known the freedom of the open sky.

Association bring you into the larger world of other people and things. Not having that is a kind of prison, a prison of such a limited consciousness, of such a limited frame of reference and association.

In the very progress of society, the prison has in the very nature of things undergone some improvement, but there are vast stretches yet to be covered before the prison becomes, if it ever does, an institution for the reclamation and rehabilitation of erring and unfortunate men and women.

We are not in prison so we are free and happy? No. We're in a different kind of prison in this life. We have to confront it, and we have to liberate Istanbul and ourselves, as well.

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.

No, no, no, no! Come, let's away to prison: We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage: When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down, And ask of thee forgiveness: so we'll live, And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues Talk of court news; and we'll talk with them too, Who loses and who wins; who's in, who's out; And take upon's the mystery of things, As if we were God's spies: and we'll wear out, In a wall'd prison, packs and sects of great ones, That ebb and flow by the moon.

There was a lot of rebelliousness, without focus, in my younger years. And even when people ask me, "Oh you went to prison and you went to college for a couple years?" I'm like "Yeah, I learned more in prison than I think I ever learned in college." That's the sad truth.

A jury found former Enron sleezeballs Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling guilty of fraud and conspiracy. Ken Lay? That's not a good name to have when you're going to prison. And Kenny Boy ain't too good either. ... I guess in prison they'll have done to them what they did to the stockholders.

The most miserable prison in the world is the prison we make for ourselves when we refuse to show mercy. Our thoughts become shackled, our emotions are chained, the will is almost paralyzed. But when we show mercy, all of these bonds are broken, and we enter into a joyful liberty that frees us to share God's love with others.

Yet there were times when he did love her with all the kindness she demanded, and how was she to know what were those times? Alone she raged against his cheerfulness and put herself at the mercy of her own love and longed to be free of it because it made her less than he and dependent on him. But how could she be free of chains she had put upon herself? Her soul was all tempest. The dreams she had once had of her life were dead. She was in prison in the house. And yet who was her jailer except herself?

It was at home I learned the little I know. Schools always appeared to me like a prison, and never could I make up my mind to stay there, not even for four hours a day, when the sunshine was inviting, the sea smooth, and when it was joy to run about the cliffs in the free air, or to paddle in the water.

This thing of darkness I acknowlege mine. There is nothing more confining than the prison we don't know we are in.

Those who grieve frequently find themselves alone. Missed is the laughter of children, the commotion of teenagers, and the tender, loving concern of a departed companion. The clock ticks more loudly, time passes more slowly, and four walls can indeed a prison make. I extol those who, with loving care and compassionate concern, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and house the homeless. He who notes the sparrow's fall will not be unmindful of such service.

The short fortune-teller who escaped from prison: a small medium at large.

I have long been aware that when an independent intellectual stands up to an autocratic state, step one toward freedom is often a step into prison. Now I am taking that step; and true freedom is that much nearer.

God sees us in secret, therefore, let, us seek his face in secret. Though heaven be God's palace, yet it is not his prison.

I'm this superphilosophical kind of person. Stuck in a prison of abstract ideas and overpowering emotions, I have this personality that makes it really hard to survive.

Envy, like a cold prison, benumbs and stupefies; and, conscious of its own impotence, folds its arms in despair.

Prison guard unions have become the powerful political forces in some states, particularly California.

Men have prayed in prison, men have prayed in slums and concentration camps. It's only the middle class who demand to pray in suitable surroundings.

The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison a more illustrious abode.

Danbury wasn't a prison, it was a crime school. I went in with a Bachelor of marijuana, came out with a Doctorate of cocaine.

If I were asked to chose between execution and life in prison I would, of course, chose the latter. It's better to live somehow than not at all.

I stagnated in prison a long time, and I have wasted most of my life.

The four walls of paper are like a prison because every idea wants to spring out in all directions - everything is connected with everything else, sometimes more than others.

Psychedelics helped me to escape.. albeit momentarily.. from the prison of my mind. It over-rode the habit patterns of thought and I was able to taste innocence again. Looking at sensations freshly without the conceptual overly was very profound.

I was struck with a bolt of distilled horror like I have never known before. Far worse than suddenly finding yourself walking through a prison cafeteria wearing Daisy Duke shorts and a Jane Fonda headband.

I hate liver, but I could imagine eating some with a little bit of ketchup. Like, a lot of ketchup. I could survive in a Turkish prison, probably.

Would you really like to live in a society where you have no responsibility and no freedom, no choice, only the false option of obedience to the law, or disobedience followed by punishment? Would you really want to go live in a prison?

What defenders of the system typically fail to acknowledge is that the reason violent offenders comprise a fairly large percentage of the state prison population is because they typically receive longer sentences than non-violent offenders.

I'm the first artist of any kind, good or bad, that was ever prosecuted by the Federal Government. Thirdly, they used the law retroactively. The obscenity statutes had changed in the early '70s, and they tried me under a 1969 statute. It was a railroad job. I was with a judge that was a Nixon appointee. A District Attorney who was a Nixon appointee. The only reason I never went to prison is because the Democrats took the White House.

It was in prison that we found the hope of salvation for the Communists. It was there that we developed a sense of responsibility toward them. It was in being tortured by them that we learned to love them.

That is my major concern: writers who are in prison for writing.

I would prefer to remain in prison for another 20 years than bargain my beliefs for freedom.

I've had some confrontations after I got out of prison and I'm proud of the fact that I dealt with them differently.

Yes, business really does change. 400 years ago, corporations were formed by royal decree. 300 years ago, many countries were powered by slave labour, or its closest moral equivalent. 200 years ago, debtors didn't go bankrupt, they went to prison. 100 years ago - well, business is largely the same as it was a century ago. And that's exactly the problem. Business hasn't changed, but today's array of tectonic global shocks demands a different, radically better kind of business. Yesterday's corporations visibly cannot meet today's economic challenges.

Being young is an 18 year prison sentence for a crime your parents committed. But you do get time off for good behavior.

Depression is a prison where you are both the suffering prisoner and the cruel jailer.

But in this Second Work if thou extract our Air and our Fire with the phlegm water, they will the more naturally and easily be drawn out of their infernal prison, and with less losse of their Spirits, than by the former way before described.

Be empty of worrying. Think of who created thought! Why do you stay in prison When the door is so wide open?

Having gone through what I went through, watching my family be torn to shreds and my children suffer immensely, I can't be the agent of doing that to someone else. I can't be the agent of causing someone to go to prison.

Today there are more African-Americans under correctional control, in prison or jail, on probation or parole, than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began. There are millions of African-Americans now cycling in and out of prisons and jails or under correctional control or saddled with criminal records. In major American cities today, more than half of working-age African-American men either are under correctional control or are branded felons, and are thus subject to legalized discrimination for the rest of their lives.