Prison make you a better judge of character. You pick up on people much faster.
In our society, if an individual commits a crime, he or she is sent to prison and they’re supposed to repay their debt to society by serving their time. But, more and more, our institutions are taking away educational programs; they’re taking away the Pell Grants so that people can take college courses.
I have left my home, my family, and my job, and I am raising my voice. To do otherwise would betray those who languish in prison. I can speak when so many cannot.
For the offenders completing these short sentences whose lives are destabilised, and for society which incurs a heavy financial and social cost, prison simply isn’t working.
The Past: Our cradle, not our prison; there is danger as well as appeal in its glamour. The past is for inspiration, not imitation, for continuation, not repetition.
When you’re in prison, the progress of the outside world doesn’t necessarily translate inside prison walls. You don’t have any rights; it just doesn’t progress along the same timeline.
The establishment wants to connect with people who are like them, and I wasn’t. I’m a black gay man from a poor working-class family. Most of the people who look like me are in prison.
I’ve worked in the prison system for five years, and most of those folks in prison didn’t have a direction.
I was a target. There was a guy who took a paint roller extension pole and blasted me in the knee a few times. I had to have surgery to relieve the pain when I got out of prison.
I’m not excusing crime or those who bring poison into the community, but I do want brothers and sisters in prison to know someone cares.
Destiny is the prison and chain of the ignorant. Understand that destiny like the water of the Nile: Water before the faithful, blood before the unbeliever.
Unfortunately, if the man who leaves the prison gates is just as likely or – as is sometimes grievously the case – more likely to offend as he was when he entered them, then we fail not only the individual but public safety as well.
The Human Rights Convention was written by Conservatives in the aftermath of the Second World War. It was designed to combat the risk of another Holocaust, and to try to stop people being sent to prison camps without trial.
I grew up in a family where my brother was in prison. My father was in prison.
It shouldn’t take extreme courage and a willingness to go to prison for decades or even life to blow the whistle on bad government acts done in secret. But it does. And that is an immense problem for democracy, one that all journalists should be united in fighting.
When I arrived in prison, they locked the prison down that day because the media was all over the place.
I’ll tell you what I think is not okay. Have you ever seen that show on MSNBC, ‘Lockup?’ It’s a reality show that takes place inside a prison. Do the prisoners have to sign release forms? Or do they have to be on it whether they like it or not?
When you’re poor and black in America, you stand a greater chance of going to prison for something you didn’t do.
I’m involved in the work around prison rights in general.
People in general have a preconceived idea of what prison is, from seeing documentaries or whatever.
I grew up in a bookless house with a father and brother who have spent most of their lives in prison, psychiatric hospitals, or living rough, and a mother who has spent her life slaving and scrimping to pay the bills, living a nervous and troubled life.
Army Specialist Bradley Manning deserves a medal, not prison.
We think of our prison inmates as the dregs of society, and we scorn them and push them off to the side and forget about them. We have to remember that they are humans, and they have rights, and yes, they did wrong, but we all have one shot at doing wrong, you know?
The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Many of those people deserve to be in prison; however, some of them do not.
The White House is the finest prison in the world.
The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison a more illustrious abode.
America is the land of the second chance – and when the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life.
I don’t have to act for work anymore; I can act for passion. That’s freeing, but it’s also a prison of its own. When you can do anything you want, you’re really responsible to do something great. And that’s scary.
Money will determine whether the accused goes to prison or walks out of the courtroom a free man.
I had a weird situation were someone used my name to extort money from a woman. He took her for 60 or 80 thousand dollars. He is in prison now. It was on Sally.
Having gone through what I went through, watching my family be torn to shreds and my children suffer immensely, I can’t be the agent of doing that to someone else. I can’t be the agent of causing someone to go to prison.
He who sells what isn’t his’n, Must buy it back or go to prison.
It’s always crude to link Dickens back to the blacking factory where he was sent to work aged 12 when his father was imprisoned in Marshalsea Prison for bad debt, but it was obviously a huge part of him.
There was a prison guard that introduced me to pro wrestling and I needed a hobby, so I devoted myself to it – I lived it, ate it and slept it and that’s how I became MVP. So people might think MVP was an overnight success, but I had to travel a long way to get there.
Bill Clinton presided over the largest increase in federal and state prison inmates of any president in American history.
Living among society’s outcasts and experiencing the brutality of America’s prison system did more to set (or confirm) the direction of my adult life than living at Yale.
What I did, you know, being away from my family, letting so many people down. I let myself down, not being out on the football field, being in a prison bed, in a prison bunk, writing letters home, you know. That wasn’t my life.
No one wants to be sent to prison, including me.
This is not rocket science. If you mentor and support people when they leave prison they’re less likely to reoffend.
America is the land of the second chance – and when the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life.
We live in a country where posting ‘Let’s riot or something bruv!’ on Facebook will get you a couple of years in prison, while writing a column saying we should bomb Syria is practically an entrance exam for public intellectuals.
Lots of people think I went to prison. I never went to prison. I was in jail without bail.
I stopped going to high school when I met Big Pun, which wasn’t the smartest thing. So I never got my diploma. When I went to prison, it’s mandatory to get your GED if you don’t have a high school diploma.
And I did wonder – because it’s now three years ago since I left prison – whether there would come a time when I would forget it, or it would be in the past as anything else might be – no, it’s there every day of my life.
The one public system in which America goes out of its way to provide services to African-Americans is prison.
When I was sixteen years old, I was sentenced to two years in prison; the Swedish government changed it, so I could go to a boarding school as part of a social programme. I was in this boarding school with some of the richest kids in Sweden.
The prison industrial complex is perhaps, at least domestically, the most striking example of us putting profit before people. It all stems from one basic misunderstanding: that the public good can be shepherded by private interests.
Interesting enough, we had a reunion of the 12 of us who graduated, right? The only one who wasn’t there was the guy who became a priest, and he was literally in prison in Libya, for being a Catholic priest. Isn’t that interesting? Everybody else made the reunion but that guy.
My grandfather, or Nana Ji, as we called him, was a family legend. Amarnath Vidyalankar spent his life fighting for India’s independence, which included spending four years in prison in Mahatma Gandhi’s movement. I still remember the conversations we had together, many of them while playing chess.
Prison is a recruitment center for the army of crime. That is what it achieves.
I was not aware of a ton of the stuff that was being said about me out in the world since I wasn’t able to get British or American headlines from my prison cell in Perugia. But I was aware that in the courtroom, I was being called a succubus, a man-eater, ‘Foxy Knoxy.’
When I first went to prison, I was even questioning where, God, where are you?
I made a movie where I played a girl that just got out of prison and we shot it very very quickly but very intensely-that took me a long time to get over.
One thing about racing, a lot of times you’ll get upset with someone, yet we live in confinement here. It’s almost like we live in a prison and you have to try and get along. Forgive and forget.
I’m a big fan of ‘Prison Break’ – I’ve watched it eight times.
It is shocking how much a day-care center is like a prison. They both have security cameras with walled exercise yards. Prisons are permanent day cares for people permanently in time-out – convicts.
