Quotes About The Prison System

#1. I'm a prison abolitionist because the prison system as it is set up is just not working. It's horrible.

Ava DuVernay

#2. Whites have more than eleven times the net worth or wealth of African Americans. They make greater salaries. Our unemployment rate is twice theirs. You look at the prison system and who that's chewing up.

Randall Robinson

#3. America is the greatest nation ever founded. The ideals are the greatest ever espoused in human history, and we just need the country to live up to them. But what I worry about are the 1 million black men in the prison system.

Henry Louis Gates

#4. The prison system, inherently unjust and inhumane, is the ultimate expression of injustice and inhumanity in the society at large.

Jessica Mitford

#5. I know what it's like to be ignored, and I think that is the big problem about the prison system: These people are being thrown away. There is no sense of rehabilitation. In some places, they are trying to do things. But, in most cases, it's a holding cell.

Lee Tergesen

#6. The rise of the antiwar and civil rights movements, along with the emergence of radical groups such as the Black Panthers, the Black Liberation Army, the Puerto Rican independence movement, and the American Indian movement, saw a return to systematized abuse within the prison system.

Chris Hedges

#7. With Animal Factory you'd think that because it's mostly interiors, you could shoot it anywhere. So we shot this in Philadelphia, and we had the cooperation of the prison system.

Steve Buscemi

#8. I've worked in the prison system, on death row and maximum security. I did that work for six years. I've worked with some of the most difficult people in our society. Buddhism was accessible and helpful for these individuals.

Joan Halifax

#9. I've worked in the prison system for five years, and most of those folks in prison didn't have a direction.

Stedman Graham

#10. I have a lot of fans who are in the prison system, where ramen noodles are a kind of staple. Prisoners are always sending me recipes.

Chuck Palahniuk

#11. The percentage of Americans in the prison system, has doubled since 1985.

Serj Tankian

#12. I've probably been spit on more that any person alive outside of, I would say, a member of the prison system.

Iggy Pop

#13. A war on cops? Then the question becomes who are they warring with? Because if you look at the prison system you can tell who the Prisoners of War are. The Black Man. Words are powerful and we must stop these divisive words that tare our country further apart instead of bringing us together.

Bobby F. Kimbrough Jr.

#14. I personally could never come to terms with my label of 'Criminally Insane'. Just because of my violent outbursts in prison, don't mean to say I'm mad. Obviously I had become a disruptive element within the penal system. Uncontrollable! Unpredictable! But that don't make insanity!

Stephen Richards

#15. We have our own system, ... and journalists in our system are not put in prison for embarrassing the government by revealing things the government might not wish to have revealed. The important thing is that our system, under which journalists can write without fear or favor, should continue.

Chris Patten

#16. One out of 100 citizens of the U.S. is going to prison, and it's not that the system is making criminals, it's that it's making criminals better criminals. We're breeding them like rats and it has to change.

Val Kilmer

#17. You can do almost anything if you put your mind to it. Be it the perfect murder, robbing a bank or owning your own company. I don't go along with Prince Charles' maxim that everyone should know their place and limitations.

Stephen Richards

#18. There is no regular system of taxation, but when the Emperor or the Bashaw want money, they levy on some rich man, and he has to furnish the cash or go to prison. Therefore, few men in Morocco dare to be rich.

Mark Twain

#19. Prison is for rapists, thieves, and murderers. If you lock someone up for smoking a plant that makes them happy, then you're the fucking criminal.

Joe Rogan

#20. It is the system, rather than individuals, that is the source of pollution and degradation. My prison-house environment is but another manifestation of the Midas-hand, whose cursed touch turns everything to the brutal service of Mammon.

Alexander Berkman

#21. The fundamental question Juvenile Court was designed to ask - What's the best way to deal with this individual kid? - is often lost in the process, replaced by a point system that opens the door, or locks it, depending on the qualities of the crime, not the child.

Edward Humes

#22. I'd kill for any one of my friends. Thankfully for the overpopulated prison system, I don't have any friends.

Jarod Kintz

#23. No one who worked in "Corrections" appeared to give any thought to the purpose of our being there, any more than a warehouse clerk would consider the meaning of a can of tomatoes, or try to help those tomatoes understand what the hell they were doing on the shelf.

Piper Kerman

#24. No one should ever be wrongfully deprived of their rights to liberty and freedom without just cause, yet in the past 25 years alone thousands of people have been wrongfully convicted and sentenced to tens of thousands of years in prison.

Bernard B. Kerik

#25. The English prison system is altogether mediaeval and outworn. In some of its details, the system has improved since they began to send the Suffragettes to Holloway. I may say that we, by our public denunciation of the system, have forced these slight improvements.

Emmeline Pankhurst

#26. Form is burden. Sometimes being part of the system enslaves the mind and greatly limits the imagination by enslaving it to form. Form is a burden to the mind that sees no limits. Form is a prison for the soul who sees possibilities outside the lines and wishes to test them.

Suzy Kassem

#27. Of the three official objects of our prison system: vengeance, deterrence, and reformation of the criminal, only one is achieved; and that is the one which is nakedly abominable.

George Bernard Shaw

#28. The rush I got from crime was better than that of glue, drink or hash. I loved playing cat and mouse with the local coppers. He Who Dares Wins, the SAS motto, was very applicable to my life then.

Stephen Richards

#29. Haldol is an antipsychotic." He dropped his reading glasses into his shirt pocket. "It was used in the Soviet prison system to break prisoners' wills." "And I'm only discovering it now?" I said.

Maria Semple

#30. The screws are just as bad as us, maybe not now but certainly in the past they used to beat you with their riot batons, strip you naked, cuff your hands behind your backs and then take shots of kicking you in the head and body until you were knocked out.

Stephen Richards

#31. if the system is 99 percent accurate, 22,284 innocent persons are in prison. If the system is 99.9 percent accurate, that is still 2,228 innocent people in prison.

Jim Petro

#32. In a system which denies the existence of basic human rights, fear tends to be the order of the day. The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear. Never let fear prevent you from doing right.

Aung San Suu Kyi

#33. I've definitely become more aware of the penal system and more aware of what life could be like inside a prison.

Dean Winters

#34. I want to be a figure for prison reform. I think that the criminal justice system is rotten.

Henry Louis Gates

#35. We call our system the Department of Corrections, or simply Corrections, but correcting or any notion of rehabilitation has been largely thrown to the wayside in favor of punitive action through the revocation of selfhood.

Erika Camplin

#36. 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

#37. The prison industrial system, things like that are cleverly put in place to attempt to marginalize a certain group of people - and it's not only black, it's replete across the American society.

Keith Stanfield

#38. Thirteen years have past since 1993, and I still have not seen one single book, documentary or anything to the biggest epidemic in Scottish, British prison history. I would go as far and say, no other prison in the world had fourteen men catching the HIV virus at the same time.

Stephen Richards

#39. The one public system in which America goes out of its way to provide services to African-Americans is prison.

Nicholas Kristof

#40. America should meet its obligations in the form of Social Security, Medicare, our ability to pay our military, legally binding legislation that allows unemployment compensation, the judiciary, the federal court system, the federal prison system, all those kinds of things have to be paid for.

Bill Johnson

#41. Aberdeenshire's Peterhead jail housed the hardest, badest, meanest motherfucker prisoners in the Scottish prison system. So no one was surprised when the pressure pot jail finally erupted in to violence that has not been seen or equalled since.

Stephen Richards

#42. We are reaching the point, if we have not passed it already, where the largest public housing program in America will be our penitentiary system.

Barbara Ehrenreich

#43. I believe, and I may be wrong, the system sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. Prison is supposed to rehabilitate, but they don't do that in a lot of cases.

Amaury Nolasco

#44. One in three young African American men is currently under the control of the criminal justice system - in prison, in jail, on probation, or on parole - yet mass incarceration tends to be categorized as a criminal justice issue as opposed to a racial justice or civil rights issue (or crisis)

Michelle Alexander

#45. It is a mistake to believe that a thought system based on lies is weak. Nothing made by a child of God is without power. It is essential to realize this, because otherwise you will be unable to escape from the prison you have made.

Foundation For Inner Peace

#46. There's a difference between what I would like to have been and what I would have been. I always fantasized about being a reforming judge or prison governor (I think that the UK penal system is a disgrace) - but it's fantasy.

Mary Beard

#47. My concern is not for the judicial system, but for the reality that the shark fin mafia of Costa Rica has a price on my head, and a Costa Rican prison would provide an excellent opportunity for someone to exercise this lethal contract against me.

Paul Watson

#48. In 2006, the state of California spent $3.5 billion on the state university system. It spent $9.9 billion on the state prison system.

Ken Robinson

#49. I understand now that the only time black people don't feel guilty is when we've actually done something wrong, because that relieves us of the cognitive dissonance of being black and innocent, and in a way the prospect of going to jail becomes a relief.

Paul Beatty

#50. The riot screws did not stop there, they dragged him down the corridor where ten other nameless screws repeatedly coshed him over the head and face and body. Dingus by now was totally out cold, he had received the equivalent injuries of someone who was involved in a car crash.

Stephen Richards

#51. After all of the reforms that he implemented, Ohio's prison system showed the lowest rates of recidivism in the nation.

Tag Powell

#52. Crime is a social problem, and education is the only real deterrent. Look at all of us in prison; we were all truants and dropouts, a failure of the educational system. Look at your truancy problem, and you're looking at your future prisoners. Put the money there.

Wilbert Rideau

#53. In the federal system alone there were 90,000 prisoners locked up for drug offenses, compared with about 40,000 for violent crimes. A federal prisoner costs at least $30,000 a year to incarcerate, and females actually cost more.

Piper Kerman

#54. That missleproof glass might as well have been electrified fence and barbed wire. No one could fashion a prison so perfect, so complete, as the one the masters of humanity had created for themselves.

S.J. Kincaid

#55. Over the next sixteen years, I would grow close to the ringleaders of the infamous Peterhead Prison Riot and hostage-taking incidents would loom large in my life.

Stephen Richards

#56. Under Kingsley Shacklebolt, Azkaban was purged of Dementors. While it remains in use as a prison, the guards are now Aurors, who are regularly rotated from the mainland. There has been no breakout since this new system was introduced.

J.K. Rowling