prisons Quotes

Many a serious thinker has been produced in prisons, where we have nothing to do but think.

“‘Think about it. Our memories are wiped. We live inside a place that seems to have no way out, surrounded by bloodthirsty monster-guards. Doesn’t that sound like a prison to you?’ As he said it out loud, it sounded more and more possible. Nausea trickled into his chest”

“My turn came next. Marie threw me a kiss. I looked back as I walked away. She hadn’t moved; her face was still pressed to the rails, her lips still parted in that tense, twisted smile.”

“And the more I thought about it, the more I dug out my memory things I had overlooked or forgotten. I realized then that a man who had lived only one day could easily live for a hundred years in prison. He would have enough memories to keep him from being bored. In a way, it was an advantage.”

“Yes, it was the hour when, a long time ago, I was perfectly content. What awaited me back then was always a night of easy, dreamless sleep. And yet something has changed, since it was back to my cell that I went to wait for the next day… as if familiar paths traced in summer skies could lead as easily to prison as to the sleep of the innocent.”

“When the Khalils get arrested for selling drugs, they either spend most of their life in prison, another billion-dollar industry, or they have a hard time getting a real job and probably start selling drugs again. That’s the hate they’re giving us, baby, a system designed against us. That’s Thug Life.”

“A man must go to prison in his best clothes.”

″‘This is the Quiet Box,’ Grandma said. ‘It is much more durable than any cell in the entire dungeon. It holds only a single prisoner, but it always holds a single prisoner. The only way to get the captive out is to put another in.‘”

“For many of us, the hospital was as much a refuge as it was a prison. Though we were cut off from the world and all the trouble we enjoyed stirring up out there, we were also cut off from the demands and expectations that had driven us crazy. What could be expected of us now that we were stowed away in a loony bin? The hospital shielded us from all sorts of things. We’d tell the staff to refuse phone calls or visits from anyone we didn’t want to talk to, including our parents.”

“Every window on Alcatraz has a view of San Francisco.”

“He started asking me, ‘What are you thinking?’ I never knew what to say. My head was empty and I liked it that way. Then he began to tell me what I might be thinking. ‘You seem sad today,’ he’d say, or ‘Today, you seem puzzled about something.’ Of course I was sad and puzzled. I was eighteen, it was spring, and I was behind bars.”

“Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning. Once it does, it becomes the kind of thing that makes you grab your wife around the waist and dance a jig.”

“When he remembered his old habitation, and the wisdom of the den and his fellow-prisoners, do you not suppose that he would felicitate himself on the change, and pity them?”

″ This was that cult, and the prisoners said it had always existed and always would exist, hidden in distant wastes and dark places all over the world until the time when the great priest Cthulhu, from his dark house in the mighty city of R’lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring the earth again beneath his sway.”

“The wide corridor up the center of E Block was floored with linoleum the color of tired old limes, and so what was called the Last Mile at other prisons was called the Green Mile at Cold Mountain.”

“Yes, well, in that respect and many others, American high schools do rather resemble prisons.”

“It is possible that I appear to you a powerful person. I wear a uniform, I have a certain authority over those under me. But I am in prison, dear lady from Haarlem, a prison stronger than this one.”

“I could not visit the prison daily. I was sure to be caught and punished. But I had to visit the prison daily. Curzon’s life depended on it.”

“The political prisoners were liberated a few days later. There were 3000 of them.”

“Any person who claims to have deep feeling for other human beings should think a long, long time before he votes to have other men kept behind bars – caged. I am not saying there shouldn’t be prisons, but there shouldn’t be bars. Behind bars, a man never reforms. He will never forget. He never will get completely over the memory of the bars.”

“When we break down our prison walls and run towards freedom, we are in fact running into the more spacious exercise yard of a bigger prison.”

“Why do they keep us behind high wire fences like we are criminals?”

“Guards kept telling us that no one wanted us in Australia.”

“It’s just that I was released from prison today.”

“Ninety percent of those admitted to prison for drug offenses in many states were black or Latino, yet the mass incarceration of communities of color was explained in race-neutral terms, an adaptation to the needs and demands of the current political climate. The New Jim Crow was born.”

“Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?”

“The Panopticon is a marvelous machine which, whatever use one may wish to put it to, produces homogeneous effects of power.”

“The age of sobriety in punishment had begun.”

“A penal system must be conceived as a mechanism ... to administer illegalities differentially, not to eliminate them.”

“Set the force that drove the criminal to the crime against itself.”

“Delinquency (is) a politically or economically less dangerous—and ... usable—form of illegality.”

“It would not be true to say that the prison was born with the new codes.”

“The soul is the prison of the body.”

“Prison agrees with me. There’s no hypocrisy here. Kill or be killed, and everybody knows it.”

“‘Is it terrible here? Do they hurt you?’ ‘Not as much as I hurt them.‘”

“Milena, Bartolomeo, Helen, and Milos have left their prison-like boarding schools far behind, but their futures remain in peril. ”

″ ‘We will have to shut you up where you can’t do any more harm.’ They took him away and shut him in prison.”

“It is quite a revelation to discover that the place you wanted to escape to is the exact same place you escaped from. That the prison wasn’t the place, but the perspective.”

“My life is the Crown and yours is politics, and I will not trade one prison for another.”

“One of them yell out, ‘Don’t let them punk you, Li’l Don and Li’l Zeke! It don’t matter that my pops been locked up for nine years or that King’s pops been dead almost as long. They still Big Don, the former crown, and Big Zeke, his right-had man. That make me Li’l Don and King Li’l Zeke. Guess we not old enough to go by our own names yet.”

“A few blocks south lay the Walnut Street Prison, where Blanchard had flown that remarkable balloon. From the prison’s courtyard it rose, a yellow silk bubble escaping earth. I vowed to do that one day, slip free of the ropes that held me. Nathaniel Benson had heard me say it, but did not laugh.”

“Indistinctly, he was sensing that the world he knew so well, the only world he had ever known until now, was a sort of prison, and that its people, his people, were trapped within its high walls.”

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.”

“I have saddled myself with the burdens of innocent people rotting away in prison while rapists and murderers roam free.”

“I ask you the same question again: if you consider me guilty, why don’t you take me to prison?”

“Ah, Rodion Romanovitch, don’t put too much faith in words, perhaps prison will not be altogether a restful place.