Quotes About Prison

You can be locked away in prison and be free if your mind is not a prison. Or you can be walking around with lots of credit cards and be in a prison, the prison of your own mind, the prison of your illusions.

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.

I find it weird that people who claim to speak for the prisoners basically want to keep them in cages all the time - and then they'll fight for better prison libraries or whatever. It's like they're missing the big picture. If I were in prison, of course I would prefer to be outside doing physical labour. It's not physical labour but prison life that kills a person. It's so bad inside that the outside jobs are often sought after. So, yeah, call them work crews and let them do it. At the same time the retributive side can feel the cons are being punished.

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.

Being a figurehead for those with family members in prison is somewhat new for me. Something I've discovered since my father's incarceration is that the prison system is broken. My first-hand experiences have taught me that reform needs to happen sooner than later. I'm most interested in mentoring children with parents in prison. When a parent is sentenced to a jail term, the child is sentenced to the same time to be spent without a mother or father. No child should suffer a stigma or lack support and guidance because of the sins of a parent.

Doth not a man die even in his birth? The breaking of prison is death, and what is our birth, but a breaking of prison?

I have been studying how I may compare this prison where I live unto the world; Shut up in the prison of their own consciences.

No one is punished for free speech in Cuba. If free and inconvenient thoughts were a crime in our country, I would have been a good candidate for prison, with my advocacy for sexual self-determination. Those people are in prison because they are mercenaries paid by Washington.

The idea we have of prison is a scary place that also houses crazy people. And, to me, it was like, none of these guys were scary. They may have done things that are violent or scary, but these are not people that I feel nervous being around, and it feels like to me that we're wasting these men's lives in prison.

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!

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.

The candle burns not for us, but for all those whom we failed to rescue from prison, who were shot on the way to prison, who were tortured, who were kidnapped, who "disappeared". That's what the candle is for

You are all in jail. Each alone, solitary, with a heap of what he owns. You live in prison, die in prison. It is all I can see in your eyes - the wall, the wall!

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.

Veels vithin veels, a prison in a prison.

In fact, in some countries there are actually voting drives conducted in prison! But here in the U.S., we seem to take the idea of democracy a bit less seriously and people are denied the right to vote not only when they are in prison, but also upon release in many states.

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.

They're not supposed to show prison films in prison. Especially ones that are about escaping.

My time in prison only deepened my resolve against apartheid. Even while I was in prison, I fought against it, teaching my cellmates about white supremacy and how to fight against it.

Prison is not a mere physical horror. It is using a pickaxe to no purpose that makes a prison.

I've got a lot of letters from prison. Lost was a big prison show. But it's really crazy when you get the letter that says, 'So, I'm getting out in three months, I've only been in for 17 years and I'd really like to meet you.'

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.

I spent much of my prison time reading. I must have read over 200 large books, mostly fictional stories about the American pioneers, the Vikings, Mafia, etc. As long as I was engrossed in a book, I was not in prison. Reading was my escape.

It is very seldom that any one is in prison for an ordinary crime unless early in life he entered a path that almost invariably led to the prison gate. Most of the inmates are the children of the poor. In many instances they are either orphans or half-orphans; their homes were the streets and byways of big cities, and their paths naturally and inevitably took them to their final fate.

I remember my emotions the day we watched Nelson Mandela walk out of prison Writing & literature in South Africa during the anti-apartheid years, became a 'cultural weapon.' You had to use it to fight apartheid & some of us resisted that in the end, you recognize that you are facing a government that has no scruples about using culture & art to oppress you.

Jason Rezaian is finally headed home. He's the correspondent for The Washington Post who was held in Iran for a year and half while U.S. diplomats, his family and his editors worked to win his release. Rezaian was one of the four Americans released from prison in Tehran in a swap for seven Iranians held in U.S. prisons.

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.

Barack Obama says he's gonna stay in Washington, but presidents don't stay in Washington. Presidents, they get out of there as fast as they can, 'cause it's like a prison to them. And Michelle Obama's even said as much about the White House. So the fact that he's gonna stay there has always told me that he's gonna stay there to protect his legacy, whatever it is, and that he's not gonna observe the age-old protocols of standing aside and staying silent for awhile while the new president takes office.

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.

Spiritual models for me are the communities of Tibetans living in exile in India, or the banjars of Bali, which exist in times of difficulty, oppression. Alternative spaces-perhaps this kind of communication can take place over the Net? Probably only up to a point as the Net's controlled by the military. But the idea is to live outside multi-national, monocultural, commodification prison, outside the grey areas of power-mad, monied collusion.

We are part of the whole which we call the universe, but it is an optical delusion of our mind that we think we are separate. This separateness is like a prison for us. Our job is to widen the circle of our compassion so we feel connected with all people and situations.

When you're in prison, and we're left to our own devices, you're stripped of everything, and you really get to see who these people are, the good and the bad.

I have somewhere read that conscience not only sits as witness and judge within our bosoms, but also forms the prison of punishment.

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.

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

I feel that if I ever did adjust to prison, I could by that alone never adjust to society.

As the nation-state has monopolized habeas corpus … on balance we have far more people in prison, federal and state, than ever.

I miss dogs, man. I always had a family pet, always had a dog growing up. It was almost equivalent to the prison sentence, having something taken away from me for three years. I want a dog just for the sake of my kids, but also me. I miss my companions.

The night in prison was novel and interesting enough.... I found that even here there was a history and a gossip which never circulated beyond the walls of the jail. Probably this is the only house in the town where verses are composed, which are afterward printed in a circular form, but not published. I was shown quite a long list of verses which were composed by some young men who had been detected in an attempt to escape, who avenged themselves by singing them.

Those things which make the infernal regions terrible, the darkness, the prison, the river of flaming fire, the judgment seat, are all a fable, with which the poets amuse themselves, and by them agitate us with vain terrors.

I'm in prison. But my heart and mind is free. Gangsta haters on the streets are doing more time than me. They need 30 police escorts with them every time they walk down the street.

For one who is indifferent, life itself is a prison. Any sense of community is external or, even worse, nonexistent. Thus, indifference means solitude. Those who are indifferent do not see others. They feel nothing for others and are unconcerned with what might happen to them. They are surrounded by a great emptiness. Filled by it, in fact. They are devoid of all hope as well as imagination. In other words, devoid of any future.

The world was not meant to be a prison in which man awaits his execution.

The people resemble a wild beast, which, naturally fierce and accustomed to live in the woods, has been brought up, as it were, in a prison and in servitude, and having by accident got its liberty, not being accustomed to search for its food, and not knowing where to conceal itself, easily becomes the prey of the first who seeks to incarcerate it again.

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.

I said to myself if Christianity is dead, I will sit at its tomb and will weep until it arises again, just as Mary Magdalene sat at the tomb of Jesus and wept until Jesus showed Himself. Then when I came out of prison I saw Christianity is not dead. The number of practicing Christians in Rumania according to the figures given by the Communists themselves in 20 years of Communist dictatorship has grown 300 percent.

During the 1960s, one neighborhood in San Francisco had the lowest income, the highest unemployment rate, the highest proportion of families with incomes under four thousand dollars a year, the least educational attainment, the highest tuberculosis rate, and the highest proportion of substandard housing ... That neighborhood was called Chinatown. Yet, in 1965, there were only five persons of Chinese ancestry committed to prison in the entire state of California.

African-American men are more likely to be killed in police incidents, stopped and searched, and sentenced to longer prison terms than white men convicted of similar crimes. Behind these statistics are heart-wrenching stories of lives cut short and families ripped apart.