Top 100 Quotes About Prisons
#1. I would suggest that the prisons I incessantly create are not designed to lock me in, rather they are designed to lock the world out. And the oddity is that either way, I am a prisoner who has sentenced himself to a prison within which I do not belong.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#2. Prisons are universities of crime, maintained by the state.
Pyotr Kropotkin
#3. Exhale the remnants/Of wounds that steal your freedom./No more prisons. Breathe.
Staci Backauskas
#4. I waltzed into the hall with my escort of five screws like some rapper with his well-paid entourage. A fiendish looking, little bastard with blonde hair and a crooked nose came up to me and said, 'Okay, Holland, welcome to Shotts. Welcome to the man-eater!
Stephen Richards
#5. I tell ya, I know the best way to get girls. I hang out at women's prisons, and wait for parolees.
Rodney Dangerfield
#6. Christians talk as though goodness was their idea but good behavior doesn't have any religious origin. Our prisons are filled with the devout.
Andy Rooney
#7. Fences can be prisons, in a way. They're necessary for those incapable of learning restraint, but they diminish life.
Tamera Alexander
#8. No one ever went to prison because of bad grammar, but the prisons are full of people who are there because of emotional illiteracy.
Gay Hendricks
#9. A society has to make a choice: tolerate alternative lifestyles or build more prisons.
Rick Steves
#10. Rip the prisons
open
put the
convicts
on
television
Norman Mailer
#11. There are areas of official life in the United States that are similar to Russia. For example: disbursement of protest, and the way American prisons are run, which is pretty tough.
Nadezhda Tolokonnikova
#12. Who else but that oracle of American liberalism, the New York Times, could run the puzzled headline: "Crime Keeps On Falling, but Prisons Keep On Filling." But? How about this wild theory: If you lock up the criminals, crime declines.
Charles Krauthammer
#13. It has come to the time where the most dangerous place to be in America is not the inner city, where gangs threaten innocent lives, or in angry prisons, where only the fit survive, but in the womb of a mother who is being told that if she doesn't really want the baby, an abortion is the solution.
Charles R. Swindoll
#14. Virtually everything that the government does costs more than when the same thing is done in private industry - whether it is building housing, running prisons, collecting garbage, or innumerable other things. Why in the world would we imagine that health care would be the exception?
Thomas Sowell
#15. Little islands are all large prisons; one cannot look at the sea without wishing for the wings of a swallow.
Richard Francis Burton
#16. And I see the - you know, when I go to the juvenile detention centers and prisons, I see people who can't read now. And I know that when they leave those prisons and those detention centers, they're not going to be able to make it in our society.
Walter Dean Myers
#17. Mental ghettos are not mirages; they actually exist in palpable reality: being "open" inside one's mental or intellectual ghetto does not open its door but simply allows one to harbour the illusion that there is no ghetto and no door. The most dangerous prisons are those with invisible bars.
Tariq Ramadan
#18. Yes, Ryn, a woman. A soldier who has taken the heads of gods, escaped from countless prisons and dungeons, and decimated an army of mortals by herself. Do not underestimate her simply because she wears a bra.
Bethany K. Lovell
#19. Places of confinement providing free food and medical care are called prisons.
John Lilly
#20. If you ask for good schools, you aren't likely to get them. If you ask for jobs or economic investment, you won't get that either. But what we have learned, is that the one thing that poor folks of color can ask for and get are Police & Prisons.
Michelle Alexander
#21. Look, we'll have to confront the pathologies of poverty at some point. We can deal with them cheaply at the front end, in infancy. Or we can wait and jail a troubled adolescent at the tail end. To some extent, we face a choice between investing in preschools or in prisons.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#22. What troubles me most about my lovely country is that its children are seldom taught that American freedom will vanish, if, when they grow up, and in the exercise of their duties as citizens, they insist that our courts and policemen and prisons be guided by divine or natural law.
Kurt Vonnegut
#23. When the true criminals are running around free, the only honorable place for a decent human being is in prisons.
Henry David Thoreau
#24. As long as there are prisons, police, armies, navies; we are not civilized. When the Earth joins together and uses the Earth intelligently, that will be the beginning of civilization.
Jacque Fresco
#25. After a couple of weeks in Polmont, I started to become more assertive and began arguing with older, bigger boys. I loved it. This is where my ugly side would make some scary and unpredictable appearances. Even to this day, I can go from a happy-go-lucky cunt to the devil on acid.
Stephen Richards
#26. Kitsch is the most pernicious of all prisons. The bars are covered with the gold of simplistic, unreal feelings, so that you take them for the pillars of a palace.
Pascal Mercier
#27. If we seek solace in the prisons of the distant past
Security in human systems we're told will always always last
Emotions are the sail and blind faith is the mast
Without the breath of real freedom we're getting nowhere fast.
(History Will Teach Us Nothing)
Sting
#28. As an actor I worked for seven years with a community theater company based in London. We used improvisation techniques to take stories to young people who wouldn't normally have access to them - in prisons, hospitals, young offender's units, youth clubs and housing estates.
Jenny Downham
#29. The only dead bodies from marijuana are in the prisons and at the hands of the police. This is ridiculous.
Jack Herer
#30. Are traditional schools very much like mini-prisons? Do they stifle imagination, cramp the child physically and mentally, and run on various forms of overt or covert terrorism? Of course, the answer is an unambiguous YES.
Robert Anton Wilson
#32. When it comes to psychopaths, there is no medication. There is no treatment. There is no cure. There are only prisons. - JENI GREGORY, PHD, LICSW, CCM, CCTP
Robert Dugoni
#33. Readers are bullied in schoolyards and in locker-rooms as much as in government offices and prisons.
Alberto Manguel
#34. The problem is that the Iraqi people are facing atrocities from both sides - Zarqawi and also the American troops at times. The Zarqawi groups uses car bombs, the Americans use other bombs. You also know what they do in the prisons.
Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani
#35. Obviously, there are people who constrict themselves and build walls around themselves, whether it's from a moral standpoint or a patriotic standpoint, or just plain old conformity, and who therefore live in those little prisons, and when things breach those walls, it's shocking for them.
George Carlin
#36. 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.
Eckhart Tolle
#37. Have not prisons - which kill all will and force of character in man, which enclose within their walls more vices than are met with on any other spot of the globe - always been universities of crime?
Peter Kropotkin
#38. It's no surprise that at the same time that American universities have engaged in a serious commitment to diversity, they have been thought-prisons. We are not talking about diversity in any real way. We are talking about brown, black, white versions of the same political ideology.
Richard Rodriguez
#39. Our schools are much like our prisons: they disappoint us because they only do what they're designed to do, and it annoys us that they don't do something else!
Daniel Quinn
#40. Somehow, we each create our own prisons, one for which only we, hold the key.
Sue J. Daniels
#41. We can't keep weapons out of prisons; we can't possibly expect to keep them out of airports.
Bruce Schneier
#42. And although black civil rights leaders like to point to a supposedly racist criminal justice system to explain why our prisons house so many black men, it's been obvious for decades that the real culprit is black behavior - behavior too often celebrated in black culture.
Jason L. Riley
#43. I've spent a lot of time in prisons, first doing legal work and later, teaching.
Peter Orner
#44. I've always been tremendously interested in criminal law. It goes to a deep interest I have in prisons and the criminal element, and what we do as a society with it. I've always been touched by the idea of criminality.
Elizabeth Strout
#45. The cells smell is a great feature of French prisons. Ours in No.44 was one of those fine broad-shouldered up and coming young smells, which stand on both feet and look the world in the eye. We became very fond and proud of it.
P.G. Wodehouse
#46. Corporations care very much about maintaining the myth that government is necessarily ineffective, except when it is spending money on the military-industrial complex, building prisons, or providing infrastructural support for the business sector.
Michael Lerner
#47. The measure of a friendship is not its physicality but its significance. Good friendships, online or off, urge us toward empathy; they give us comfort and also pull us out of the prisons of our selves.
Esther Earl
#48. Prisons where people can't even work is the worst punishment you can think of. And I don't think we should put all convicts in such facilities where people are deprived of their freedom.
Vladimir Putin
#49. Night raids are only the first step in the American detention process in Afghanistan. Suspects are usually sent to one of a series of prisons on U.S. military bases around the country. There are officially nine such jails, called Field Detention Sites in military parlance.
Anand Gopal
#50. The armored men counted to three, then burst inside the flat, shouting impressive things like "clear!" or "go go go!" as they did. Oda said, "Gum?"
"You chew gum?"
"No. but I always carry it, to use as barter when visiting prisons."
"Do you see how I'm not asking you?"
"Smart.
Kate Griffin
#51. It is certain that the study of human psychology, if it were undertaken exclusively in prisons, would also lead to misrepresentation and absurd generalizations.
Jacques-Yves Cousteau
#52. I am not saying people shouldn't be held accountable for terrible acts. But holding people in prisons does not necessarily make them responsible or accountable. It makes them bad. It makes them evil. It puts an end to any process of transformation. It hardens them spiritually and psychologically.
Eve Ensler
#53. In those years only the dead smiled, Glad to be at rest: And Leningrad city swayed like A needless appendix to its prisons.
Anna Akhmatova
#54. So entrapped are we in our self-expectation and self-imposed limitations that we fail to see that we have always had the keys to our own prisons - we're just scared shitless to use them.
Rollo Tomassi
#55. What a pity that most young people instead of seeing one animal in nature--which is worth a hundred in any Zoo--must derive their knowledge of God's creatures from their appearance in prisons. ... How do we manage to think that we know all about an animal by gazing at him penned in a cage?
Dhan Gopal Mukerji
#56. Our health care system squanders money because it is designed to react to emergencies. Homeless shelters, hospital emergency rooms, jails, prisons - these are expensive and ineffective ways to intervene and there are people who clearly profit from this cycle of continued suffering.
Pete Earley
#59. Jails and prisons are the complement of schools; so many less as you have of the latter, so many more must you have of the former.
Horace Mann
#60. One should not be deceived: great spirits are skeptics ... Strength, FREEDOM which is born of the strength and overstrength of the spirit, proves itself by skepticism. Men of conviction are not worthy of the least consideration in fundamental questions of value and disvalue. Convictions are prisons.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#61. There are hundreds of prisons - sexual, political, cultural. But being a prisoner also gives you impetus.
Gerald Stern
#62. I have always hated crowds. I like deserts, prisons, and monasteries. I have discovered, too, that there are fewer idiots at 3000 meters above sea level than down below.
Jean Giono
#63. I knew a girl so ugly, they use her in prisons to cure sex offenders.
Rodney Dangerfield
#64. Prisons are fascinating places, especially when the inmates are educated white-collar types.
John Grisham
#65. My writing is like those little carved baskets made in prisons ...
Leo Tolstoy
#66. But neither milk-white rose nor red
May bloom in prison air;
The shard, the pebble, and the flint,
Are what they give us there:
For flowers have been known to heal
A common man's despair.
Oscar Wilde
#67. Are the prisons overpopulated, or is the population over-imprisoned ?
Michel Foucault
#68. Men simply copied the realities of their hearts when they built prisons.
Richard Wright
#71. Prisons are the temples where devils learn to prey. Every time we turn the key we twist the knife of fate, because every time we cage a man we close him in with hate.
Gregory David Roberts
#72. First of all, I didn't suggest that we should simply get rid of all prisons.
Angela Davis
#73. In 1982 President Ronald Reagan called for a war on drugs: by 1990 more men were in federal prisons on drug charges alone than had comprised the entire 1980 federal prison population for all crimes combined.
Laurie Garrett
#74. The outer prisons are made by the community to contain those who have dared break its laws. The inner prisons each man makes for himself because of what he feels are his transgressions.
Lucy Freeman
#75. Rigid traditions capture souls
prisons of spiritual thought
man's religion has captured a god
grown too small and very weak.
David W. Earle
#76. We've got to clear some of the room out of the prisons so we can put the bad guys in there, like the pedophiles and the politicians.
Kinky Friedman
#77. More than 90 percent of all the prisoners in our American prisons have been abused as children.
John A. Powell
#78. You expect me to believe that you're being held against your will?" I raised a skeptical eyebrow. "You're roaming around the castle freely."
"As are you." He turned away from me then. "Not all prisons have bars. You should know that better than anyone, Princess.
Amanda Hocking
#79. I'll tell you, the screws' faces painted an even greater picture than my words can describe. We kept emptying our pots in the hall for two weeks before the screws started emptying our piss pots for us, but this didn't last too long after we started calling them bellhops.
Stephen Richards
#80. It is far cheaper to build schoolhouses than prisons, and it is much better to have scholars than convicts.
Robert G. Ingersoll
#81. If you've ever wondered how many prisons need to operate withinin America, just look at the literacy rate. 60% of America's prison inmates are illiterate and 85% of all juvenile offenders have reading problems.
United States Dept. Of Education
#82. The Americans make associations to give entertainment, to found seminaries, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner, they found hospitals, prisons and schools.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#83. Back in pre-Revolutionary America cruel and unusual punishment meant the rack and burning at the stake ... in more recent rulings it has been taken to mean the absence of cable television and denial of sex-change operations, or just overcrowding in the prisons.
Tom Clancy
#84. The way people are treated in them [prisons] is very similar to gulags.
Jerry Brown
#85. Those pinked-skinned Jesus freaks that made the laws and owned the prisons were makin' more money off the drug game than we ever did.
Connor Pritchard
#86. Some people hate the smell of hospitals. I hate the smell of jails and prisons, all the same: stale cigarette smoke, Pine-Sol, urine, sweat, and dust.
Ann Rule
#87. Until 1869, when they were banned, debtors' prisons were the great incinerators of British reputations. Those who were unable to pay their bills were jailed until their creditors were paid - an unlikely event, given that the prisoner was unable to work.
Tina Brown
#88. Deer must be in the forest not in the zoo; monkey must be in the forest, not in the zoo; bear must be in the forest, not in the zoo! Animal prisons must be abolished!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#89. The biggest kick I get is to communicate with those who are exiled from the game - in hospitals, homes, prisons - those who have seldom seen a game, who can't travel to a game, those who are blind.
Jack Buck
#90. [Prison] relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism and, increasingly, global capitalism.
Angela Y. Davis
#91. My movies were the kind they show in prisons and airplanes, because nobody can leave.
Burt Reynolds
#92. Illegal immigrants are using our resources, taking our jobs, filling our schools, our hospitals and our prisons, and we are paying for it all.
Dan Benishek
#93. Our universities should produce good criticism; they do not or, at best, they do so only as federal prisons produce counterfeit money: a few hardened prisoners are more or less surreptitiously continuing their real vocations.
Randall Jarrell
#94. All these institutions [prisons] seemed purposely invented for the production of depravity and vice, condensed to such a degree that no other conditions could produce it, and for the spreading of this condensed depravity and vice broadcast among the whole population.
Leo Tolstoy
#96. The literacy level at Mississippi prisons? Fifth grade. Can't read, what are you going to do? If you've got a conviction rap, what are you going to do? It's a real crisis.
Marian Wright Edelman
#97. A word of advice: If you get the choice between the upper and lower bunks in a cell, choose the lower. Prisons do not turn off their lights at night, and I spent a sleepless night, without a mattress, with a five-hundred-watt bulb shining directly into my eyes.
William Powell
#98. Many of us are in are in our own prisons that aren't made of iron bars.
Hill Harper
#99. Those eyes, seemingly without mystery, are like certain closed cities, such as Lyons and Zurich, and they hypnotize me as do empty theaters, deserted prisons, machinery at rest, deserts, for deserts are closed and do not communicate with the infinite.
Jean Genet
#100. We need to fight for free education and defund the prisons
Chris Crass
