Quotes About Prison

My personal story is that my father was a heroin addict and a heroin dealer and has been in and out of prison my entire life, he's been arrested sixty times. I also have an older brother addicted to crack cocaine who's been in and out of prison so it was really important for me to tell a story that shows the humanity and the journey of a man getting of our prison and trying to re-acclimate into society. It's apart of our community that we have stereotypes and ideas about but we don't actually know much about it, unless we know someone personally.

Prison life taught him how little one can get along with, and what extraordinary spiritual freedom and peace such simplification can bring. I remember again, ironically, that today more of us in the world have the luxury of choice between simplicity and complication of life. And for the most part, we, who could choose simplicity, choose complication. War, prison, survival periods, enforce a form of simplicity on us. The monk and the nun choose it of their own free will. But if one accidentally finds it, as I have for a few days, one finds also the serenity it brings.

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.

To try to raise a son from inside the prison walls is a very difficult thing. But I want to say to the world my son at 16 was the one who tried the most to get me out of prison.

Wrong believing puts people in a prison. Right believing is a light that illuminates the path to freedom out of this prison.

A prison does not only lock its inmates inside, it keeps all others out. Her strongest prison is of her own construction.

Today I live on an island, in a house that is sad, hard, severe, that I built for myself, solitary on a sheer rock over the sea: a house that is the spectre, the secret image of prison. The image of my nostalgia. Maybe I never desired, not even then, to escape from jail. Man is not meant to live freely in freedom, but to be free inside a prison.

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.

Well I think after leaving prison, and having written three diaries about life in prison, it became a sort of a new challenge to write another novel, to write a new novel.

The cruelest prison of all is the prison of the mind.

Behind every great man in prison is another great man in prison.

When I went out to shoot for the first time, I thought this was going to be about the prison industrial complex, purely about prison for profit and the ways in which there's an industry making money and profiting off punishment.

There are laws in some countries, I believe, which prohibit anyone from following you in the street, and if someone does, he can be arrested and put into prison. So, spiritually, I wish there were a police system which would put people into a spiritual prison for following others. In fact, it does happen automatically.

To revolt within society in order to make it a little better, to bring about certain reforms, is like the revolt of prisoners to improve their life within the prison walls; and such revolt is no revolt at all, it is just mutiny. Do you see the difference? Revolt within society is like the mutiny of prisoners who want better food, better treatment within the prison; but revolt born of understanding is an individual breaking away from society, and that is creative revolution.

We have this exploding prison population. We have the equivalent of martial law on a day-to-day, 24/7-hour basis in our cities, because we have not heard the cry for help by young people in 1967.

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.

The prison-industrial complex and the military-industrial complex are here with us and are multi-billion dollar enterprises. We can make more money off the kid in Compton if he's a criminal instead of a scholar. It's business.

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

I'm feeling pretty good. A lot of people don't know this, but I am not currently in prison, which feels great.

Mr. McCain fought in Vietnam. I think that he has enough blood of peaceful citizens on his hands. It must be impossible for him to live without these disgusting scenes anymore. Mr. McCain was captured and they kept him not just in prison, but in a pit for several years. Anyone [in his place] would go nuts.

The only victory that really counts in prison is survival. But survival means more than simply being alive. It's not just the body that must survive a jail term; the spirit and the will and the heart have to make it through as well. If any one of them is broken or destroyed, the man whose living body walks through the gate, at the end of his sentence, can't be said to have survived it. And it's for those small victories of the heart, and the spirit, and the will that we sometimes risk the body that cradles them.

During the Boom Years, it was so easy to lose sight of basic values. For example, there was lots of nonsense said and written about the so-called "New Economy." Some people said all economic laws have been overturned! Then all the problems developed. Corporations were heavily fined for illegalities. Many of their senior-level executives were indicted, convicted, and sent to prison.

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

There will be no prison which can hold our movement down.

Malcolm X educated himself in prison by reading.

The worst prison would be a closed heart.

Prison is not a place for humans. Period. It's just an animal house.

I'm never going to get married again. Three strikes, you're out. I think if I would try to get married again in California, I have to go to prison, don't I? I think you only get three.

If he has a conscience he will suffer for his mistake. That will be his punishment-as well as the prison.

I begin to understand that failure is its own reward. It is in the effort to close the distance between the work imagined and the work achieved wherein it is to be found that the ceaseless labor is the freedom of play, that what’s at stake isn’t a reflection in the mirror of fame but the escape from the prison of the self.

You have put so much energy into building a prison for yourself. Now spend as much on demolishing it.

I strongly believe that for serious and violent criminals, we must absolutely hold them accountable for their crimes and send them to prison.

Freedom or prison--what's the difference? A man must develop unwavering will power subject only to his reason.

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

They let dangerous men out of prison now, yes sir, I'm afraid it's so. Cause they're over crowded and it was only his fifth offense.

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.

One in three young African American men is currently under the control of the criminal justice system in prison, in jail, on probation, or on parole - yet mass incarceration tends to be categorized as a criminal justice issue as opposed to a racial justice or civil rights issue (or crisis).

Every single ancient wisdom and religion will tell you the same thing - don't live entirely for yourself, live for other people. Don't get stuck inside your own ego, because it will become a prison in no time flat.

I am proud of being in a U.S. federal prison and surviving 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.

I started out in 1985, and I was Inmate #1 in every prison movie made from '85 to '93.

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.

I found fame to be somewhat of a prison. The more famous you were, the smaller the cell that you had to live in.

Shut up in the prison of their own consciences.

I met Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Engels and Mao when I entered prison and they redeemed me.

I feel like somebody who just got out of prison after 40 years for something she didn't do, like I got pardoned by the governor. When dear friends deal with me with mixed emotions, it is a little like being told, 'Well, Jenny, we're glad you got sprung, really, but quite honestly we did kind of like you better when you were in jail.