Top 585 Prison Quotes

My buddy tells me a lot of interesting stories about what goes on in prison – it just makes my head spin about what they deal with on a day-to-day basis.

There’s a small group of music critics in the States who will forgive you anything – jazz, a long prison term, or what have you – anything but scoring a Hollywood musical.

If you desecrate a white grave, you wind up sitting in prison. But desecrate an Indian grave, and you get a Ph.D.

It’s a monstrous idea to put people in prison and keep them there.

I know that we’ve had a lot of immigration. How many immigrants are in prison? And what I found was – and I’m a fanatical researcher – what I found was a massive cover-up by both the government and the media in not telling us how many immigrants are in prison.

I think corporations are a whole lot different than people. I mean, I don’t know a corporation would be put in prison. I do know people would be put in prison.

Prison conditions in some parts of the world can be very poor, overcrowded and, in some cases, dangerous and sentences can be much tougher than in the U.K.

I would make the case that the vast majority of prisoners leave prison and go back into society. We share that society with them and what sort of people do we want them to be.

When I left prison, I had to figure out how to embrace my past.

I believe prisons have emerged as a new frontline in the fight against crime. The fact is, new technology and sophisticated approaches mean that prison walls alone are no longer effective in stopping crime – inside or outside of prison.

I’m a prison abolitionist because the prison system as it is set up is just not working. It’s horrible.

The most valuable blacks are those in prison, those who have the warrior spirit, who had a sense of being African. They got for their women and children what they needed when all other avenues were closed to them.

I was a kid who was born and raised on Johnny Cash. My father played ‘At Folsom Prison’ constantly. Cash was the only thing I remember coming from our big, warm stereo console. Even then, I knew Cash was uncool. I knew he was an unhip Republican.

On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break.

The day-to-day discomforts of prison life, combined with the big-picture realities of mass incarceration, do not add up to a party.

The lack of space and a growing prison population has strained resources and put pressure on all levels of the penal system.

When we first started to write our first movie, ‘You Are Going To Prison,’ we wanted it to be crazy and unique, brand new, our voice, not like anything that’d ever been before. It took us about a year to write our first script.

With no other security forces on hand, U.S. military was left to confront, almost alone, an Iraqi insurgency and a crime rate that grew worse throughout the year, waged in part by soldiers of the disbanded army and in part by criminals who were released from prison.

Being an actor in L.A. is like being in prison: you go, you serve your time, you try to replicate Johnny Depp’s career – and then you move to Paris.

People who meet me as an adult are often surprised that I’m alive and have never been in prison or rehab. Sometimes they’re disappointed I’m not cooler.

Trying to explain the First Step Act in prison reform in a tweet or Facebook post is not easy.

Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage.

In the deregulated realm of US banking and finance, crime does occasionally pay for its foul deeds, not in prison time but by making modest rebates to the victims.

Custom is a prison, locked and barred by those who long ago were dust, the keys of which are in the keeping of the dead.

In light of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, critics are arguing that abuses of Iraqi prisoners are being produced by a climate of disregard for the laws of war.

The English prison system is altogether mediaeval and outworn. In some of its details, the system has improved since they began to send the Suffragettes to Holloway. I may say that we, by our public denunciation of the system, have forced these slight improvements.

I was an opportunist and got away with things because I was very young, but I went to prison and came out and remade my life.

The prison industrial system, things like that are cleverly put in place to attempt to marginalize a certain group of people – and it’s not only black, it’s replete across the American society.

For those of us in the opposition movement under dictatorships, part of our job is confronting police and spending time in prison. So, a dissident not only needs to learn how to oppose oppression but also how to face the crackdowns and time in prison.

How does a nice Catholic girl end up going to prison for a year? It’s crazy. I’ve made mistakes. I have to pay for those mistakes.

America should be ashamed to say they have the best justice system in the world when, every day, race plays a part in who goes to prison, who don’t go to prison.

It’s an unfortunate fact that in the male black population, a very significant percentage of them, more so than whites or other minority candidates, because of convictions, prison records, are never going to be hired by a police department. That’s a reality. That’s not a byproduct of stop-and-frisk.

During my time in prison, I told myself that I wanted to be a part of the solution and not the problem.

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

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.

Show me a university which is a hotbed of thin-skinned offence-taking, where every unacceptable idea is policed and every person who happens to hold one is hounded out of a job, and I will show you a university that isn’t a university but an ideological prison camp and indoctrination centre.

Women have worked hard; starved in prison; given of their time and lives that we might sit in the House of Commons and take part in the legislating of this country.

Oh, what am I for the Frenchman or the Italian? A guy who was in prison, a revolutionary, somebody they once read something about in the newspaper – but not me.

Not all psychopaths are in prison – some are in the boardroom.

My father, David Gilbert, is in prison in New York. He is lucky that he has a single cell, not shared with another person. His cell is about eight feet by eight feet.

Nelson Mandela sat in a South African prison for 27 years. He was nonviolent. He negotiated his way out of jail. His honor and suffering of 27 years in a South African prison is really ultimately what brought about the freedom of South Africa. That is nonviolence.

Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.

Prison gives you time to reflect.

I had a lot of friends who were also football players. Some of them ended up in prison, some of them had injuries. I think of my group of friends, I am the only one who is a professional footballer.

It was my first time in prison. I was there to volunteer with Defy Ventures, along with 500 teammates Tara Graham, Brian Wang, and Aerin Lim. While I didn’t feel particularly scared about going to prison, I had no idea what to expect.

The only time you can be completely free from risk is when you’re in prison.

It’s time to debate images, especially when someone’s going to prison for downloading them.

I couldn’t get on a ‘Source’ cover ’til I went to prison.

Stack the cards in your favour, and in a casino, you’ll get arrested and put in prison, but in business and in life, it’s the right thing to do.

I did almost a year in prison, a year in prison, just because my name is Foxy Brown.

But you see, that’s the gilded prison of fashion. We’re riding in private jets, and meantime I was so incredibly, painfully sad and lonely.

I never thought about becoming a politician. But during the military dictatorship, my grandfather was put in prison six times and my father twice. If my family and my country didn’t have this history, I might be a professor somewhere today.

When I made ‘Real,’ I recorded it over the phone in prison. I did it in a week. I had no idea what it was going to sound like. I couldn’t even listen to the masters before it came out, I couldn’t listen to 90% of the beats. I recorded 21 songs in seven days.

It’s a long story, my life, growing up with my dad, my mom when she died, everything. I had bad moments in my life, my dad going to prison, I had nothing, and that’s where I got my motivation.

I didn’t mind the 23 hours a day solitary confinement for the majority of the time, because after the first few years in prison, when I stopped being angry and started to like myself and understand myself, it was OK. I still enjoy my own company sometimes.

I’ve taught in prison; I’ve counseled people… I’ve been arrested; I’ve been to the psychiatrist.

The woman who runs the Pennsylvania Innocence Project told me that there’s a man she’s been trying to get out of prison for 26 years. Every night before she goes to bed, she thinks, ‘What is he doing?’ She says you don’t sleep. And yet, she has the greatest sense of humor and this light that comes out of her.