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 is quite literally a ghetto in the most classic sense of the word, a place where the U.S. government now puts not only the dangerous but also the inconvenient—people who are mentally ill, people who are addicts, people who are poor and uneducated and unskilled. Meanwhile the ghetto in the outside world is a prison as well, and a much more difficult one to escape from than this correctional compound. In fact, there is basically a revolving door between our urban and rural ghettos and the formal ghetto of our prison system.

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.

AQAL is a map of samsara, a map of the prison, but if you gonna make a prison brake,you need a good map. (laughter)

I've worked in the prison system for five years, and most of those folks in prison didn't have a direction.

For a year after that was done to me I wept every day at the same hour and for the same space of time. That is not such a tragic thing as possibly it sounds to you. To those who are in prison tears are a part of every day's experience. A day in prison on which one does not weep is a day on which one's heart is hard, not a day on which one's heart is happy.

Grit is not synonymous with hard work. It involves a certain single-mindedness. An ungritty prison inmate will mount a daring new escape attempt every month, but a gritty prison inmate will tunnel his way out one spoonful of concrete at a time. Grit

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.

I had a song called "Folsom Prison Blues" that was a hit just before "I Walk The Line." And the people in Texas heard about it at the state prison and got to writing me letters asking me to come down there. So I responded and then the warden called me and asked if I would come down and do a show for the prisoners in Texas.

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.

For example, if you are a blogger who wrote something about a local official and you're going to prison for that, you're a political prisoner. If you're a businessman who has refused to cede his business to the local official and you're going to prison for that, you're not a political prisoner. In that second category there are hundreds of thousands of people in Russia.

We're all in prison. All of us are in prison, but some of us have a key.

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.

It is only after slavery and prison that the sweetest appreciation of freedom can come.

That subtle knot which makes us man So must pure lovers souls descend T affections, and to faculties, Which sense may reach and apprehend, Else a great Prince in prison lies.

We're talking about a prison-industrial complex. We're talking about a war on drugs that's generating unprecedented levels of incarcerated folk. We're talking about dilapidated housing. We're talking about joblessness and underemployment.

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.

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

A cement mixer collided with a prison van on the Kingston Pass. Motorists are asked to be on the lookout for 16 hardened criminals.

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

Sixty per cent of people entering prison today are illiterate.

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.

Have you seen the cover of Newsweek? They have Martha Stewart on the cover, but it's not actually Martha. It's a doctored photo. They put Martha's head on a slimmer woman's body. And Martha was very upset about this. She said, 'Hey, if I wanted my face on another woman's body, I'd stay in prison.'

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

Most people who work in prison earn money through contraband.

Childhood is the one prison from which there's no escape, the one sentence from which there's no appeal. We all serve our time.

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.

I was in prison for a charge in Texas, murder one. Back in the '70s in Texas, I was there. I heard the shot. I was in the car.

I had a lot of time and the first year I was in prison, I tried to get the party to stop the shooting, to stop the talk about the gun thing.

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

When tradition is thought to state the way things really are, it becomes the director and judge of our lives; we are, in effect, imprisoned by it. On the other hand, tradition can be understood as a pointer to that which is beyond tradition: the sacred. Then it functions not as a prison but as a lens.

When [Nelson Mandela] was in prison I admired him for his moral strength... Of his period in power I can see few results. Apartheid no longer exists, at least to all appearances, but no one understands what the new government in South Africa is doing.

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

If industrial man continues to multiply his numbers and expand his operations he will succeed in his apparent intention, to seal himself off from the natural and isolate himself within a synthetic prison of his own making.

Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison.

One of the things that made me long to be back in prison was that I had so little opportunity for reading, thinking and quiet reflection after my release. I intend, amongst other things, to give myself much more opportunity for such reading and reflection.

In Santiago, the capital of the kingdom of Chile, at the moment of the great earthquake of 1647 in which many thousands lost their lives, a young Spaniard called Jeronimo Rugera was standing beside one of the pillars in the prison to which he had been committed on a criminal charge, and he was about to hang himself.

I was a very shy girl who led an insulated life; it was only when I came to Oxford, and to Harvard before that, that suddenly I saw the power of people. I didn't know such a power existed, I saw people criticising their own president; you couldn't do that in Pakistan - you'd be thrown in prison.

If you read the biographies of people who have written good books, you often see the point where they suddenly come into themselves, and those weeks in the spring of 1997 were when I came into myself as a writer. They feel like some of the best weeks of writing I’ll ever have. The discovery that I could write better about something as trivial as an ordinary family dinner than I could about the exploding prison population of the United States, and the corporatization of American life, and all the other things I’d been trying to do, was a real revelation.

I think, at some level, we see young people all over the country mobilizing around different issues, in which they're doing something that I haven't seen for a long time. And that is, they're linking issues together. You can't talk about police violence without talking about the militarization of society in general. You can't talk about the assault on public education unless you talk about the way in which capitalism defunds all public goods. You can't talk about the prison system without talking about widespread racism. You can't do that. They're making those connections.

The piebald mare paws at the sand; I see her digging out of the corner of my eye and hear her grinding her teeth. That bridle's her curse, this island her prison. She still smells of rot.

Some artists imagine they've got a hold on this apparatus, which in fact has got a hold of them. As a result, they end up supporting a cultural prison that is out of their control

Let me start with Yahoo. As we meet today, a Chinese citizen who had the courage to speak his mind on the Internet is in prison because Yahoo chose to share his name and address with the Chinese Government.

Were I to go down into the market-place, armed with the powers of witchcraft, and take a peasant by the shoulders and whisper to him, 'In your lifetime, have you known peace?' wait for his answer, shake his shoulders and transform him into his father, and ask him the same question, and transform him in his turn to his father, I would never hear the word 'Yes,' if I carried my questioning of the dead back for a thousand years. I would always hear, 'No, there was fear, there were our enemies without, our rulers within, there was prison, there was torture, there was violent death.

I pulled the boy close to me and said you see that girl, thats my only lil girl. So if you think about huggin or kissin. Remember these words. I aint afraid to go back to prison.

No man will be kept in hell loner than is necessary to bring him to a fitness for something better. When he reaches that stage the prison doors will open and there will be rejoicing among the hosts who welcome him into a better state.

You have no doubt guessed long since that the conquest of time and the escape from reality, or however else it may be that you choose to describe your longing, means simply the wish to be relieved of your so-called personality. That is the prison where you lie.

Everyone must have felt that a cheerful friend is like a sunny day, which sheds its brightness on all around; and most of us can, as we choose, make of this world either a palace or a prison.