PRISON QUOTES
quotations about prison
You can tell a lot about a civilization by the quality of the people found in its jails.
DAVID GERROLD
Under the Eye of God
The first prison I ever saw had inscribed on it CEASE TO DO EVIL: LEARN TO DO WELL; but as the inscription was on the outside, the prisoners could not read it.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
preface, Imprisonment
Year after year the gates of prison hells return to the world an emaciated, deformed, willless, ship-wrecked crew of humanity, with the Cain mark on their foreheads, their hopes crushed, all their natural inclinations thwarted. With nothing but hunger and inhumanity to greet them, these victims soon sink back into crime as the only possibility of existence. It is not at all an unusual thing to find men and women who have spent half their lives--nay, almost their entire existence--in prison.
EMMA GOLDMAN
"Prisons: A Social Crime and Failure", Anarchism and Other Essays
No one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens but its lowest ones.
NELSON MANDELA
Long Walk to Freedom
Some prisons don't require bars to keep people locked inside. All it takes is their perception that they belong there.
LYSA TERKEURST
Unglued
No prison can shut out God.
J. F. LA HARPE
attributed, Day's Collacon
Prison is like high school with knives.
RAEGAN BUTCHER
attributed, IMDb
It is in prison ... that one becomes a real revolutionary.
VLADIMIR LENIN
attributed, "Communists: The Battle Over the Tomb", TIME Magazine, April 24, 1964
It must surely be a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit that even a small number of those men and women in the hell of the prison system survive it and hold on to their humanity.
HOWARD ZINN
You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train
The genius of the current caste system, and what most distinguishes it from its predecessors, is that it appears voluntary. People choose to commit crimes, and that's why they are locked up or locked out, we are told. This feature makes the politics of responsibility particularly tempting, as it appears the system can be avoided with good behavior. But herein lies the trap. All people make mistakes. All of us are sinners. All of us are criminals. All of us violate the law at some point in our lives. In fact, if the worst thing you have ever done is speed ten miles over the speed limit on the freeway, you have put yourself and others at more risk of harm than someone smoking marijuana in the privacy of his or her living room. Yet there are people in the United States serving life sentences for first-time drug offenses, something virtually unheard of anywhere else in the world.
MICHELLE ALEXANDER
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
There are worse prisons than words.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
The Shadow of the Wind
If Americans actually have the conversation about our disastrous prison policies, we'll understand the trends all move in very dangerous directions: we lock up more people, for less violent crime, at ever greater expense, breeding more dangerous criminals who often come out unemployable, violent and isolated.
DAHLIA LITHWICK
Newsweek, June 15, 2009
The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
The Scarlet Letter
What is the cause that compels a vast army of the human family to take to crime, to prefer the hideous life within prison walls to the life outside? Certainly that cause must be an iron master, who leaves its victims no avenue of escape, for the most depraved human being loves liberty.
EMMA GOLDMAN
"Prisons: A Social Crime and Failure", Anarchism and Other Essays
I was most happy when pen and paper were taken from me and I was forbidden from doing anything. I had no anxiety about doing nothing by my own fault, my conscience was clear, and I was happy. This was when I was in prison.
DANIIL KHARMS
Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings
How come life in prison doesn't mean life? Until it does, we're not ready to do away with the death penalty. Stop thinking in terms of "punishment" for a minute and think in terms of safeguarding innocent people from incorrigible murderers.
JESSE VENTURA
I Ain't Got Time to Bleed
The most important step is to demand for the prisoner the right to work while in prison, with some monetary recompense that would enable him to lay aside a little for the day of his release, the beginning of a new life.
EMMA GOLDMAN
"Prisons: A Social Crime and Failure", Anarchism and Other Essays
How feeble is all language to describe the horrors we inflict upon these wretches, whom we mason up in the cells of our prisons, and condemn to perpetual solitude in the very heart of our population.
HERMAN MELVILLE
Typee
Remember those in prison as if you were their fellow prisoners, and those who are mistreated as if you yourselves were suffering.
BIBLE
Hebrews 13:3
There is often but one step from a throne to a prison.
ACHMET IV
attributed, Day's Collacon