I’ve never been in prison. I’ve been in jail a lot. But I’ve never actually been sentenced to anything.
A children’s author on a soapbox is not a pleasant sight but I have become drawn into issues, slightly unwillingly, relating to young people, literacy and youth justice: just look at the number of young people we have locked up in prison, and the uselessness of it.
Prison opened my eyes to so many things. It was a great time. I met interesting people. I got to understand the behaviour of the police and the media. I am an observer of the human race.
People return home from prison and face legal discrimination in virtually all areas of social and economic and political life. They are legally discriminated against employment, barred from public housing, and denied other public benefits.
I believe we are nearing a time when a combination of technology and radical thinking will make it possible for much more intensive and restrictive conditions to be applied in more creative and fundamental ways outside of prison.
There were a lot of moments in my life where I could have died or I could have ended up serving 20 years to life in prison. I overcame those things, those obstacles, because I listened and I obeyed that higher power that was speaking to me at the crucial moments in my life when it really counted.
I’ve been an activist since I was a teenager. I was always curious about what we would now call social justice. I remember just trying to navigate growing up poor in an overpoliced environment with a single mother and a father who was in and out of prison.
Money will determine whether the accused goes to prison or walks out of the courtroom a free man.
One of the best movies of the year was ‘Rise of the Planet of the Apes.’ That’s not just an action movie – it’s a prison film.
Dogmas are collective conceptual prisons. And the strange thing is that people love their prison cells because they give them a sense of security and a false sense of ‘I know.’ Nothing has inflicted more suffering on humanity than its dogmas.
I spent my life behind bars, and what people don’t know is getting out of prison is really nerve-racking – you’re not used to society; you’re not used to the world going by so fast – so to step on that lot was quite overwhelming.
Political prisoners are important to support because we are in prison for explicitly social/political/progressive goals. Our lack of freedom does affect how free you are; If we can be violated, so can you.
I went to Rikers one time to do ‘Third Watch,’ and I remember thinking, ‘Wow, this is a scary place.’ We were using a section of the prison where half of it was still populated by inmates.
When you are in prison, you have but one desire: freedom. If you fall ill in prison, you do not think about freedom – you think about health. Health is, therefore, more important than freedom.
Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X came out of prison stronger.
That is how prison is tearing me up inside. It hurts every day. Every day takes me further from my life.
May was young and beautiful, we were legally married, but she was caught in the prison of my skin.
Across the nation, there are thousands of individuals serving life or life-equivalent sentences for crimes they committed as children. This means they will likely die in prison without a chance to prove to society they are worthy of a second chance.
Prison killed me. It destroyed me.
A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
Don Siegelman should be a star in the Democratic Party. Instead, he’s a former elected official sentenced to prison by a right-wing judge in Alabama.
After twelve years in prison, I think I have listened to the radio maybe 30-40 times in all, and only when I have been without even a TV.
I served my time and came out of prison when I was just 26 and have worked with the government for 37 years. But people only remember me for what I did before that.
I just absolutely, totally hated school. It was like a prison to me. I just could not stand that structured, absolute disciplined way of having to deal with life.
The crime bill basically incentivized the prison system. There were quotas, mandatory minimums. You have to serve 85 percent of your time, so it is guaranteeing that bodies will always be locked up. And that went mostly towards minority communities and poor communities, where crime is more rampant.
I believe God talks to us in mysterious ways. I knew if I did not pay attention to His message, I was going to do life in prison, or I was going to end up dead.
I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.
I got rounded up by the police in Quito as I didn’t have my passport with me. I was in prison for a night, which was pretty frightening, made more so when one of my male companions started crying.
It was good to get out of prison and home to the family.
There was a prison uprising at Alcatraz, and I drove the Marines over there in a landing craft to quell the riot. I am the only serviceman I know with an American Theatre ribbon.
Adversities such as being homeless and going to prison has made many people stronger.
Whenever my dad wasn’t working, he’d take me along to pass out biblical tracts on street corners or in visits to the local prison.
I went to live with my grandparents when my parents threw me out. Then I went to prison at the age of 17, to detention centre, and I remained there until I was 20.
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.
A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
I loved to read books in the free world, and there was a lot of time to sit around and do nothing in prison. When you read, it opens up your mind; it helped us take our minds away from where we were.
I had to grow up in prison for something I did not do.
Our prisons are very bad. When I was in Ikoyi prison, people were dying every day. They were carrying bodies out of the prison every day.
I want to be a figure for prison reform. I think that the criminal justice system is rotten.
In a system where ‘innocent until proven guilty’ is the ultimate maxim, a person who is charged but not yet convicted of a minor crime should not be sent to prison merely because he or she lacks the financial ability to post bail.
When you are in prison, you have but one desire: freedom. If you fall ill in prison, you do not think about freedom – you think about health. Health is, therefore, more important than freedom.
I saw the waterboarding device in Cambodia’s notorious Tuol Sleng prison in Phnom Penh and did not see another until I was strapped down on an identical one at SERE. Waterboarding was administered as a ‘stress demonstrator’ to show that an enemy could make one say anything. And one does.
While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.
We must do better by offenders who are sent to prison to make them less likely to return.
I won’t talk about what it was like in prison, except to say I’m glad I’m out and that I plan never to go back and to pay my taxes every day.
I couldn’t afford to get sick in prison. My sickle cell is no joke, so I couldn’t eat poorly or not exercise. And everything in jail is designed to do the exact opposite.
If Anglo feels it hasn’t done enough damage to me already by taking my money, my company, my reputation, if they want to finish it off by putting me in prison, then so be it – I’ll accept that.
It’s up to us, the people, to break immoral laws, and resist. As soon as the leaders of a country lie to you, they have no authority over you. These maniacs have no authority over us. And they might be able to put our bodies in prison, but they can’t put our spirits in prison.
A lot of times, people say, ‘You’re so much like Loretta or Tammy Wynette.’ But I feel kind of like one of the men. I’m like David Allan Coe. I’ve been to prison, man!
A lot of the best of what’s come from working on ‘Orange Is the New Black’ is working with the Women’s Prison Association and kind of getting to see firsthand what they do for incarcerated women.
The suffragettes realized the power of getting arrested and going to prison and harassing politicians and making a nuisance of themselves. It got them a lot of attention. What they never did was set out to endanger human life except for sacrificing themselves.
The media love to cover black people on the front page. After all, when you live in a society that will lock up about 30 percent of all black men at some time in their lives and send more of them to prison than to college, chances are a fair number of those black faces will end up in the newspaper.
My own life was filled with so much love and joy that when depression struck, it was like a prison door slamming shut and I was being placed in an isolation cell. No one else could possibly be feeling what I was. I hated my depression and all of its symptoms.
It doesn’t help to fight crime to put people in prison who are innocent.
You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.
I hit rock bottom before I even went there. Actually, prison was the rescue mission that God had put on me. He sent out his angels to rescue me. In prison, he protected me the whole time I was in there, and it was just for me to get my will power back, to get my strength back, get my focus together.
