Quotes About Prisons

#1. I'm an educated man, the prisons I know are subtle ones.

Roberto Bolano

#2. Ideologies are mental prisons that produce blindness.

Fernando Araya

#3. Songs are funny things. They can slip across borders. Proliferate in prisons. Penetrate hard shells. I always believed that the right song at the right moment could change history.

Pete Seeger

#4. The more freedom is extended to business, the more prisons have to be built for those who suffer from that business.

Eduardo Galeano

#5. Suddenly here was this somewhat roly-poly elderly, northern Italian peasant on the chair of Saint Peter and he was accessible - and he made himself accessible, he went to prisons, he went to hospitals, he went to the shrine of Loreto.

George Weigel

#6. Schools and schoolmasters, as we have them today, are not popular as places of education and teachers, but rather prisons and turnkeys in which children are kept to prevent them disturbing and chaperoning their parent.

George Bernard Shaw

#7. I have to say when we talk about the treatment of these prisoners that I would guess that these prisoners wake up every morning thanking Allah that Saddam Hussein is not in charge of these prisons.

James Inhofe

#8. Mrs. Greene made me understand the parallels between race and caste
and how women's bodies were used to perpetuate both. Different prisons. Same key.

Gloria Steinem

#9. The fearful and short-sighted dwell in prisons of their own making.

James Vincett

#10. In Genoa, the word, libertas can be read on the front of prisons and on the fetters of galley-slaves. The application of this motto is fine and just.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

#11. Did prisons have air-conditioning? Was it just primary schools that missed out?

Liane Moriarty

#12. Plunder has matured into habit and addiction; the people who could author the mechanized death of our ghettos, the mass rape of private prisons, then engineer their own forgetting, must inevitably plunder much more. This is not a belief in prophecy but in the seductiveness of cheap gasoline.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#13. The dirty alliance between religious preachers and possessors of power brought the boon of prisons, gallows, knouts and above all such theories for the mankind.

Bhagat Singh

#14. God uses prisons to train people for future roles of leadership or martyrdom.

Charles Colson

#15. The question is not whether there is intelligent life out there, the question is, whether there is intelligent life down here. As long as you have war, police, prisons, crime, you are in the early stages of civilization.

Jacque Fresco

#16. Look, I promise I'm not psychotic. Eccentric and idiosyncratic, but not psychotic. (Sebastian) I'll bet the prisons are full of men who have told women that. (Channon)

Sherrilyn Kenyon

#17. This
is the language of the world before - a world of chaos and confusion and happiness and despair - before
the blitz turned streets to grids, cities to prisons, and hearts to dust.

Lauren Oliver

#18. All emphasis in American prisons is on punishment, retribution, and disparagement, and almost none is on rehabilitation.

Conrad Black

#19. Let's stop wasting billions of dollars on prisons, which send people home who are too often less capable and more damaged than when they went in. We would have safer neighborhoods if we spent the same money on true rehabilitation, job training, employment and entrepreneurship.

Van Jones

#20. I just don't want the fear from the right to be used by the [Barack] Obama administration to silence critics. We have to be willing to tell the truth because we're trying to speak about conditions that are being rendered invisible in our prisons and schools in the hood and so forth and so on.

Cornel West

#21. If you desire a man to tell you comfortable lies about your prowess, and so fetter any hope of true excellence, I'm sure you may find one anywhere. Not all prisons are made of iron bars. Some are made of feather beds.

Lois McMaster Bujold

#22. Some prisons don't require bars to keep people locked inside. All it takes is their perception that they belong there.

Lysa TerKeurst

#23. We have decided to lock people up for social deviancy these days. We tell ourselves that we're not running debtors' prisons, that this isn't Dickensian

Linda Tirado

#24. I am at a crossroads; I have always been against armed opposition ... I have chosen civil disobedience. But I will apologize to my people if there are funerals coming out of prisons. I will criticize myself and I won't be the mayor of Diyarbakir.

Osman Baydemir

#25. Or is it the mind state that's ill, creating crime rates to fill the new prisons the build

Talib Kweli

#26. I run a program called Amer-I-Can. We've taught in prisons, schools, juvenile facilities and we teach in the community. We have the greatest record from the standpoint of dealing with grade point averages, disciplinary action and attendance in schools.

Jim Brown

#27. Prisons are built to break men, and when men are broken society has consummated its revenge

Jan Valtin

#28. More money is put into prisons than into schools. That, in itself, is the description of a nation bent on suicide. I mean, what is more precious to us than our own children? We are going to build a lot more prisons if we do not deal with the schools and their inequalities.

Jonathan Kozol

#29. The least I can do is speak out for the hundreds of chimpanzees who, right now, sit hunched, miserable and without hope, staring out with dead eyes from their metal prisons. They cannot speak for themselves.

Jane Goodall

#30. I'm suggesting that we abolish the social function of prisons.

Angela Davis

#31. Dutch prisons are probably the most civilized you're going to find anywhere in the world.

Paul Watson

#32. Build the prisons and they will commit the crimes.

Brian Spellman

#33. building prisons is our number one social program for young men

Gavin De Becker

#34. The world's been turned upside down. The most decent people are being sent to concentration camps, prisons and lonely cells, while the lowest of the low rule over young and old, rich and poor.

Anne Frank

#35. The United States is Fast Becoming One of the Biggest Open-Air Prisons on Earth

Mumia Abu-Jamal

#36. If you meditate regularly, even when you don't feel like it, you will make great gains, for it will allow you to see how your thoughts impose limits on you. Your resistances to meditation are your mental prisons in miniature.

Ram Dass

#37. Could we chose to amend the rules of the game to create a society that values people over profits, life over pollution, mutual care over guns and prisons, vision over dysfunction?

Vicki Robin

#38. Research conducted by the Corporation for Supportive Housing in New York State shows that the use of state prisons and city jails dropped by 74 percent and 40 percent respectively when people with past criminal records were provided with supportive housing.

Michelle Alexander

#39. Republican candidate Ben Carson told reporters he thinks American prisons might be too comfortable. As opposed to Mexican prisons that have personal showers with $5 million escape tunnels.

Jimmy Fallon

#40. California is now close to spending more on prisons than it does on higher education - surely the death warrant of a civilization.

Molly Ivins

#41. Rules must be established and enforced, and, as numbers are increased in prisons, the necessity for vigilance increases. These rules, let it be understood, may be kindly while firmly enforced. I would never suffer any exhibition of ill-temper or an arbitrary exercise of authority.

Dorothea Dix

#42. It seemed impossible that he'd chosen to live here, at a latitude where spring was a semantic variation on winter, in a grid whose rigid geometry only a Greek or a builder of prisons could love, in a city that made its own gravy when it rained.

Garth Risk Hallberg

#43. Not every one of us are born or made free of our own prisons to the extent of ourselves.

M.F. Moonzajer

#44. Once your baby starts to walk you'll realize why cribs are designed like prisons from the early 1900s. This is clearly because toddlers are a danger to themselves. The main responsibility for a parent of a toddler is to stop them from accidentally hurting or killing themselves.

Jim Gaffigan

#45. It would serve the Americans right if we emptied the prisons and let the subversives take power. They'd soon show Washington just how much they appreciate good old American values.

Mohammed Reza Pahlavi

#46. Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?

Jerry Brown

#47. We will never build enough prisons to end our crime problem.

Hillary Clinton

#48. Our prisons and our jails are now our mental health institutions

Hillary Clinton

#49. It is. And yet so few really are free. Nearly all people live in prisons of their own making, regardless of their faith, creed, sex or race.

Ted Dekker

#50. Give parents the tools to nurture their child in infancy and the result will be a more self-confident and resilient individual for decades to come. It's far less expensive to coach parents to support children than to maintain prisons years later.

Nicholas D. Kristof

#51. Gold, n.: A soft malleable metal relatively scarce in distribution. It is mined deep in the earth by poor men who then give it to rich men who immediately bury it back in the earth in great prisons, although gold hasn't done anything to them.

Mike Harding

#52. No funding for alternative sentencing instead of more prisons.

Jerry Weller

#53. Yanukovych has changed everything in Ukrainian jails - real criminals have been released, while representatives of the middle class and politically rebellious free-minded people have filled the prisons.

Yulia Tymoshenko

#54. America's prisons have become warehouses for the mentally ill.

Bryan Stevenson

#55. The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#56. Our prisons are full of people who think they're Napoleon..or God.

Ian Fleming

#57. one was present, interacting in any affirmative way with the people who filled those prisons.

Piper Kerman

#58. More prisons, more enforcement, effective death penalty.

Jerry Weller

#59. Christianity ... made, for nearly 1,500 years, persecution, religious wars, massacres, theological feuds and bloodshed, heresy huntings and heretic burnings, prisons, dungeons, anathemas, curses, opposition to science, hatred of liberty, spiritual bondage, the life without love or laughter ...

M. M. Mangasarian

#60. If it works, it works,' Kat told him.
'And if it doesn't?' he asked.
She looked at him. 'If it doesn't, then I've heard Monaco has the nicest prisons in all of Europe.'
'It does,' both Hamish and Angus said in unison.
And with that, it was decided.

Ally Carter

#61. I do not wish to remove from my present prison to a prison a little larger. I wish to break all prisons.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#62. Shortly after we arrived in Baghdad, we had another conversation with the ambassador. He said that he wanted us to give him the timeline, because we had 90 days to get these prisons operational and transfer responsibility back to the Iraqis.

Janis Karpinski

#63. Many offenders are tracked for prison at early ages, labeled as criminals in their teen years, and then shuttled from their decrepit, underfunded inner city schools to brand-new, high-tech prisons.

Michelle Alexander

#64. Let us reform our schools, and we shall find little reform needed in our prisons.

John Ruskin

#65. The early church was married to poverty, prisons and persecutions. Today, the church is married to prosperity, personality, and popularity.

Leonard Ravenhill

#66. Private prisons have a special interest in tapping the burgeoning immigrant groups to fill beds and cells, especially in the post-9/11 period of the so-called "war on terror." The

Mark Lewis Taylor

#67. America needs fewer laws, not more prisons.

James Bovard

#68. Just about every year, Congress passes another crime bill - spending billions of dollars to build more prisons, to place more band-aids on society's scars.

Carrie P. Meek

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

Robert Greene

#70. We cannot hope to effectively counter extremism if we just focus on schools, universities and prisons: we need to take this online as well.

Maajid Nawaz

#71. The world like our heads was meant to be escaped from, they are prisons world and head alike.

Michael Chabon

#72. Many countries persecute their own citizens and intern them in prisons or concentration camps. Oppression is becoming more and more a part of the systems.

Alva Myrdal

#73. If a dad does his job, we don't need prisons, we don't need jails. That's what I saw growing up.

Mike Singletary

#74. The belief that all wealth comes from stealing is popular in prisons and at Harvard.

George Gilder

#75. The court, as now constituted, would be meaningless without the jail which gives it its power. But if there is anything I have learned by being in jail, it is that prisons are wrong, simply and unqualifiedly wrong.

Barbara Deming

#76. Maybe I could survive in one of those resort prisons where they house white-collar criminals. I've always wanted to get better at tennis.

Chuck Klosterman

#77. It is not the prisoners who need reformation, it is the prisons.

Oscar Wilde

#78. Christians don't steal or lie, they don't get divorced or have abortions. If the Ten Commandments were followed by everyone we would be able to fire half the police force and in six months the prisons would be all half empty.

John Hagee

#79. The character and mentality of the keepers may be of more importance in understanding prisons than the character and mentality of the kept.

Jessica Mitford

#80. Outside of a few national security issues like treason that the Constitution lays out, we don't need federal crimes, and we don't need federal prisons. We need state crimes and state prisons.

Rob Woodall

#81. When sex becomes conscious it is love, it is no longer lust. Love brings freedom, and lust simply creates prisons for you.

Rajneesh

#82. Poor people, especially those of color, are worth nothing to corporations and private contractors if they are on the street. In jail and prisons, however, they can each generate corporate revenues of $30,000 to $40,000 a year.

Chris Hedges

#83. This is what happens in prisons I think you're not giving the prisoners the credit for how ingenious they are.

Philip Davies

#84. I love the academy in terms of the life of the mind and the world of ideas. I also love the streets. I love the churches and mosques and synagogues. I love the trade union centers. I love the community centers. I speak regularly at prisons and so forth.

Cornel West

#85. Annual state spending alone for prison facilities is now estimated at about $52 to $62 billion, the bulk of which is spent building new facilities; operating and maintaining more prisons; providing food and health care for prisoners; and administration and staff salaries and benefits.

Christopher Zoukis

#86. When we choose to live authentically we chip away at others prisons of pretend and create an opportunity for them to walk out of darkness into freedom.

Anthony Venn-Brown

#87. If people are being upstanding citizens of the Republic, then you have to widen the net to incarcerate them. This explains why America's prisons are full of nonviolent offenders - a perfect example of American exceptionalism.

Henry Rollins

#88. Hearts aren't handcuffs and people aren't prisons. When you feel it's time for you to leave, you leave. You neither need to wait to be released, nor ask for permission.

Beau Taplin

#89. Some men seem to know exactly where their opportunities lie; they break prisons and cross whole Siberias to pursue them. One room holds me.

Saul Bellow

#90. I'm starting to think you like prisons," he says, idling knocking his knuckles against the wall. "And that you have the worst taste in men.

Victoria Aveyard

#91. She knew precious little about Lithuania, she realized, and her ideas had run along the lines of Soviet concrete ghettos, TB-infected prisons, and a callous mafia. Somehow,

Lene Kaaberbol

#92. We're building prisons all over the world and calling them luxury condos.

J.G. Ballard

#93. 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

#94. Reservations were meant to be prisons, you know? Indians were supposed to move onto reservations and die. We were supposed to disappear.

Sherman Alexie

#95. We must stop the trend of closing schools and building prisons.

Gale Sayers

#96. Prisons are needed only to provide the illusion that courts and police are effective. They're a kind of job insurance.

Frank Herbert

#97. Prisons do not disappear social problems, they disappear human beings. Homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness, and illiteracy are only a few of the problems that disappear from public view when the human beings contending with them are relegated to cages.

Angela Davis

#98. Already this war on gangs in California is taking money from universities to build prisons, and the universities have some clout.

Tom Hayden

#99. Gaza is often described as 'the world's largest open air prison' because no one is allowed to enter or leave. But that seems a bit unfair to prisons - they don't have their electricity and drinking water cut off randomly almost everyday.

Banksy

#100. Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.

Judge Mills Lane