Quotes About Prison

The war on drugs has been the engine of mass incarceration. Drug convictions alone constituted about two-thirds of the increase in the federal prison population and more than half of the increase in the state prison population between 1985 and 2000, the period of our prison system's most dramatic expansion.

Very close by the CMS shops, hidden about a quarter mile away in the woods, was the prison's rifle range. Correctional officers could spend quality time with their firearms down there, and the hammering of multiple rounds was typical background noise during our workdays. There was something unsettling about toiling away for a prison while listening to your jailers practice shooting you.

It does not matter what you call the gaoler so long as he has the key that will open the door of your prison! Similarly, as I have the key to release Life from its prison, it does not matter in the least what you call either the key or myself. I am not concerned about the title.

Kids are growing up in communities in which they see their loved ones cycling in and out of prison and in which they are sent the message in countless ways that they, too, are going to prison one way or another. We cannot build healthy, functioning schools within a context where there is no funding available because it's going to building prisons and police forces.

If you go to a network and say, "I wanna do prison stories about black women and Latino women and old women," you're not gonna make a sale. But, if you've got this blonde girl going to prison, you can get in there, and then you can tell all the stories. I just thought it was a terrific gateway drug into all the things I wanted to get into.

I had to find meaning in it. So I go through this, I see all these homies die; I see all this terrible devastation, people sitting in prison. I've been saved from prison, from death, and from heroine addiction. What am I going to do with that?

We are not taught to fear our politicians, who can debase our currency, throw us in prison and send us to war - but rather we are taught to fear each other. We are taught to imagine that the real predators in this world are not those who control prison cells, national debts and nuclear weapons, but rather our fellow citizens, who in the absence of brutal control would surely tear us apart!

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.

When liberal celebs stammer out a litany of shopworn bleats about the administration's attempt to turn America into a theocratic prison state, people can't help but notice that these buskers and mummers seem unmoved by the horrors of actual prison states. (Saddam commissioned a copy of the Quran written in his own blood - but John Ashcroft is the real religious nut, don't you know.)

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.

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.

Our prison in Georgia is a very different place from this prison here in Berlin. The conditions there are inhuman.

We think that by protecting ourselves from suffering, we are being kind to ourselves. The truth is we only become more fearful, more hardened and more alienated. We experience ourselves as being separate from the whole. This separateness becomes like a prison for us - a prison that restricts us to our personal hopes and fears, and to caring only for the people nearest to us. Curiously enough, if we primarily try to shield ourselves from discomfort, we suffer. Yet, when we don't close off, when we let our hearts break, we discover our kinship with all beings.

They have chosen cunning instead of belief. Their prison is only in their minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out.

He was a first-time nonviolent possible offender, ... And under the mandatory minimums, he was put in prison for 15 years. Not only does the punishment not fit the crime, but the mandatory minimums don't give judges any discretion to look at the background of the case, to read into the specifics of the case. I don't know a judge who really is in favor of the mandatory minimums.

The first day I walked into prison, and he slammed that door, I knew the magnitude of the decision that I made, and the poor judgment, and what I allowed to happen to the animals. And, you know, its no way of explaining the hurt and the guilt that I felt. And that was the reason I cried so many nights.

There'll be moments when I'm out in the prison yard, chatting with the cast and the crew, getting ready to shoot a scene. And then I'll remember if I were actually an inmate, I'd only be out there an hour. The other 23 hours of the day, I'd be in my cell. It's kind of a downer.

An enlightened mind is not hoodwinked; it is not shut up in a gloomy prison till it thinks the walls of its dungeon the limits of the universe, and the reach of its own chain the outer verge of intelligence.

One man runs to his neighbor because he is looking for himself, and another because he wants to loose himself. Your bad love of yourselves makes solitude a prison for you.

Oh spare me, being stuck in your bedroom is not like prison. You don't have to worry about being gang-raped in your bedroom.

The world is a better place with Saddam in prison not in power.

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

The United States has more women and girls in prison than any other industrialized nation on earth.

A prison is a cross section of society in which every human strain is clearly revealed.

When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.

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.

Sixty per cent of people entering prison today are illiterate.

Prison widens your circle of friends. In my stand-up, I can now talk about things that no one else has the right to touch.

It's best that I hide my real personality. I cannot tell you what it is because I don't want to go to prison.

I knew Deng Xiaoping when he came out of prison. He had, after all, been imprisoned for nearly ten years by Mao. I know what China looked like before he took over, and so in my own mind, I don't think of Deng Xiaoping as an oppressor. I think of somebody who, faced with that crisis, made a very painful and decision with which I cannot agree. But I also think of him as a great reformer.

For many, whether they go to prison or not is far less about the choices they make and far more about what kind of cage they're born into.

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.

If all that Americans want is security, they can go to prison. They'll have enough to eat, a bed and a roof over their heads. But if an American wants to preserve his dignity and his equality as a human being, he must not bow his neck to any dictatorial government.

I'm enjoying prison ministry, particularly with the women in Hudson County Jail who have suffered tremendously in their lives.

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

The earth is not a lair, neither is it a prison. The earth is a Paradise, the only one we'll ever know. We will realize it the moment we open our eyes. We don't have to make it a Paradise-it is one. We have only to make ourselves fit to inhabit it. The man with the gun, the man with murder in his heart, cannot possibly recognize Paradise even when he is shown it.

I was in prison and I was an atheist. I didn't believe in anything.

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

My kid wants to be a prison warden when he grows up so he can put thumb tacks on the electric chairs.

Jurors realize that instead of having to make that terrible decision (voting for the death penalty), they can vote to put someone in prison and ensure that defendant is no longer a harm to society. It makes it easier for them to return a verdict of life without the possibility of parole.

Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.

Shut up in the prison of their own consciences.

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

Federal prison, if you get any of it, you're going to have to do 85% of it. And the reason why I called it that is because I had a friend who got sent to the federal joint and his whole... it wasn't about him being in jail. He cried about the 85%.

Smuggling poems out of prison in the soles of mt shoes i'm way past finding salvation in the arms of a woman, I look out my window and see burning flowers and starving armies but when I look up into the night sky I see the souls of dead heroes

Cage of freedom, that's our prison; we're the jailer and captive combined Cage of freedom, cast in power; all the trappings of our own design. Blind ambition, steals our reason; we're soon behind those invisible bars On the inside, looking outside; to make it safer we double the guard.

People in general have a preconceived idea of what prison is, from seeing documentaries or whatever.

In prison, inmates sometimes use Cheetos and grape juice as makeup. I wouldn't use that beauty regimen around Britney Spears - she might lick your face off!