Some Prisons Quotes

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

Lysa TerKeurst

#2. 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

#3. Tribes must be our homes, not our prisons.

Mark Driscoll

#4. 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

#5. Readers are bullied in schoolyards and in locker-rooms as much as in government offices and prisons.

Alberto Manguel

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. Somehow, we each create our own prisons, one for which only we, hold the key.

Sue J. Daniels

#13. We can't keep weapons out of prisons; we can't possibly expect to keep them out of airports.

Bruce Schneier

#14. 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

#15. I've spent a lot of time in prisons, first doing legal work and later, teaching.

Peter Orner

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. I began going to juvenile prisons. And some of these kids face some very, very tough lives. How do they handle these lives? Do they even know that if their life is bad, that they're still OK? Do they know that? Do they know that someone is thinking the same way that they're thinking?

Walter Dean Myers

#23. The U.S. incarceration rate is the world's highest and some nine to ten times that of many European countries. Almost 1 in 100 American adults is behind bars.61 Some U.S. states spend as much on their prisons as they do on their universities.

Joseph E. Stiglitz

#24. 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

#25. Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.

Cyril Connolly

#26. We need prisons because there are some hardcore criminals, but I never met a guy who has been in jail that came out with a smile on his face thinking, 'Right, that's it - now I am going to be good!'

Tahar Rahim

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

Tom Hayden

#28. 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

#29. I'm involved in quite a few ministries as a bridge builder, trying to match generous givers and donors to other ministries. Based on my past, I'm also involved in mainly the prison ministry. I go to jails and prisons and share my story, trying to give them some hope.

Lex Luger

#30. After the revolution, let us hope, prisons simply would not exist - if by prisons we mean places that could be experienced by the men and women in them at all as every place that goes by that name now is bound to be experienced.

Barbara Deming

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. Prisons are universities of crime, maintained by the state.

Pyotr Kropotkin

#34. Exhale the remnants/Of wounds that steal your freedom./No more prisons. Breathe.

Staci Backauskas

#35. 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

#36. I tell ya, I know the best way to get girls. I hang out at women's prisons, and wait for parolees.

Rodney Dangerfield

#37. 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

#38. Fences can be prisons, in a way. They're necessary for those incapable of learning restraint, but they diminish life.

Tamera Alexander

#39. 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

#40. A society has to make a choice: tolerate alternative lifestyles or build more prisons.

Rick Steves

#41. Rip the prisons
open
put the
convicts
on
television

Norman Mailer

#42. 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

#43. 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

#44. 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

#45. The only dead bodies from marijuana are in the prisons and at the hands of the police. This is ridiculous.

Jack Herer

#46. Little islands are all large prisons; one cannot look at the sea without wishing for the wings of a swallow.

Richard Francis Burton

#47. 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

#48. 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

#49. 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

#50. Places of confinement providing free food and medical care are called prisons.

John Lilly

#51. 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

#52. 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

#53. 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

#54. When the true criminals are running around free, the only honorable place for a decent human being is in prisons.

Henry David Thoreau

#55. 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

#56. 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

#57. 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

#58. 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