65 quotes found
"At the risk of quoting Mephistopheles I repeat: Welcome to hell. A hell erected and maintained by human-governments, and blessed by black robed judges. A hell that allows you to see your loved ones, but not to touch them. A hell situated in America's boondocks, hundreds of miles away from most families. A white, rural hell, where most of the captives are black and urban. It is an American way of death."
"PRISON, n. A place of punishments and rewards. The poet assures us that --"
"To say I was shocked, stunned, or humiliated on entering the penitentiary would not be the truth. It would not be true in nine cases out of any ten. It would be true if a man were picked up on the street and taken directly to a penitentiary, but that isn't done He is first thrown into a dirty, lousy, foul-smelling cell in some city prison, sometimes with an awful beating in the bargain, and after two or three days of that nothing in the world can chock, stun, or humiliate him. He is actually happy to get removed to a county jail where he can perhaps get rid of the vermin and wash his body. By that time, convicted, and sentenced, he has learned from other prisoners just what the penitentiary is like and just what to do and what to expect. You start doing time the minute the handcuffs are on your wrists. The first day you are locked up is the hardest, and the last day the easiest. There comes a feeling of helplessness when the prison gates wallow you up - cut you off from the sunshine and flowers out in the world - but that feeling soon wears away if you have guts. Some men despair. I am sure I did not."
"Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilisation."
"Changi became my university instead of my prison. … Among the inmates there were experts in all walks of life — the high and the low roads. I studied and absorbed everything I could from physics to counterfeiting, but most of all I learned the art of surviving."
"Every honest man in prison is tenfold more dangerous than fire burning near fire-damp. The majesty of law is defiled when the innocent are punished deliberately with the guilty."
"While there is a soul in prison, I am not free."
"And a bird-cage, sir," said Sam. "Veels vithin veels, a prison in a prison."
"A prison taint was on everything there. The imprisoned air, the imprisoned light, the imprisoned damps, the imprisoned men, were all deteriorated by confinement. As the captive men were faded and haggard, so the iron was rusty, the stone was slimy, the wood was rotten, the air was faint, the light was dim. Like a well, like a vault, like a tomb, the prison had no knowledge of the brightness outside; and would have kept its polluted atmosphere intact, in one of the spice islands of the Indian Ocean."
"The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons."
"Mr. Emerson visited Thoreau at the jail, and the meeting between the two philosophers must have been interesting and somewhat dramatic. The account of the meeting was told me by Miss Maria Thoreau [Henry Thoreau's aunt]—"Henry, why are you here?" Waldo, why are you not here?"
"The world’s prison population is estimated at around 11 million with rates of incarceration ranging from 698 per 100,000 population in the United States to as low as 16 per 100,000 in the Central African Republic. In the US, there are approximately 2.2 million people incarcerated, representing an estimated 24% of the world’s proportion of incarcerated individuals. Estimates as of mid-May 2020 in the US demonstrate that state jails hold 1,230,000 individuals, 625,000 are detained in local jails, and 225,000 in federal jails and prisons. Mass incarceration policies have important collateral damage to prisoners, their families and communities. Investing in social capital, community-building practices, public safety strategies, and violence prevention initiatives represent a more cost-effective approach. In communities with steady economic and social breakdown, many groups including African Americans, Hispanic Americans, and white working class without a bachelor’s degree are caught in this web of compound and expanding disadvantage. Worldwide, in most settings, poor urban communities experience the highest rates of both incarceration and recidivism."
"Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?"
"I will go to prison. I will be in the Gazette. I will move to a meaner situation, or anything else that is necessary."
"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."
"Roy Tillman: It's funny. Prison is the way the world should be. The natural order. No apology. Men separated by race, races stacked with the strong on top, you fuck the weak, you kill your rivals, sleep with one eye open."
"Prisons are epicentres for infectious diseases because of the higher background prevalence of infection, the higher levels of risk factors for infection, the unavoidable close contact in often overcrowded, poorly ventilated, and unsanitary facilities, and the poor access to health-care services relative to that in community settings. Infections can be transmitted between prisoners, staff and visitors, between prisons through transfers and staff cross-deployment, and to and from the community."
"Remember those in prison as if you were their fellow prisoners, and those who are mistreated as if you yourselves were suffering."
"(AG: ...you said, “I think we have to know that prison is part of society”) SJ: …in order for so many people to be incarcerated, they have to convince the population that this is no part of their life, that prison is outside of their society, that it’s not something they should be concerned about and fighting about and supporting, that it is other than the life we are living. But in fact, in my view, the fact that so many people are in prison in the United States not only shapes the lives of millions—the families, etc.—but it means that the whole society is much more repressive, because the standards of prison are constantly imprisoning the rest of us in crucial respects. But the number, the millions of people, of children who are growing up with a parent inside and who will themselves be part—you know, Mumia’s son is in prison. You know, I mean, the thing is absolutely mind-blowing, the kind of brutality that the prison system has launched in the society, generally. It’s not the only force of repression, but it is one serious source of repression."
"What I was to encounter at Greensville defied anything that I’d expected. The pigs had a refined system and license for brutalizing prisoners. I was not to understand the magnitude of the situation until a few days after being there. The pigs had a tier of handpicked proxy prisoners, whom they used to violently suppress those who got out of line. The ringleader – I’ll call him Pumpkin – was a career con with a reputation for butchering other prisoners. He had a trustee job (all trustees were similarly selected). Pumpkin was allowed by the pigs to keep weapons on his person. Part of the mental terror game was that while he was out cleaning (everyone knew he was a pig hit man and stayed armed), the pigs would bring others out around him in handcuffs. ... The next day or so the pigs would put them on the exercise yard together, remove everyone’s handcuffs except the target’s (they’d put five to seven prisoners in each pen), and allow them to mob attack the still handcuffed target. Or if they wanted him butchered, he’d be unhandcuffed and left to contend unarmed against a knife-wielding Pumpkin."
"They’ve put me in a cell on ma own. I’ve gorra TV. I watched Poltergeist on ma first night on this wing. Ya hear people goin’ on about how they shun’t have TVs in prison an’ that, how “it’s like a holiday for ’em”. Well, I’m not bein’ funny, but if I paid for a holiday an’ ended up here I’d be writin’ a very strongly worded letter to Thomas Cook."
"The law of nations knows of no distinction of color, and if an enemy of the United States should enslave and sell any captured persons of their army, it would be a case for the severest retaliation, if not redressed upon complaint."
"Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage, Minds innocent and quiet take That for an hermitage."
"Happiness is a prison, Evey. Happiness is the most insidious prison of all."
"I'm too pretty to go to jail."
"Show me a prison, show me a jail Show me a pris'ner whose face has grown pale And I'll show you a young man With many reasons why There but for fortune, go you or I."
"Over the past three decades, the number of prison inmates in the United States has increased by more than 600%, leaving it the country with the highest incarceration rate in the world. During this time, incarceration has changed from a punishment reserved primarily for the most heinous offenders to a much greater range of crimes and a much larger segment of the population."
"Doubles grilles à gros cloux, Triples portes, forts verroux, Aux âmes vraiment méchantes Vous représentez l'enfer: Mais aux âmes innocentes Vous n'etes que du bois, des pierres, du fer."
"The newspapers are gonna be tough on you. And prison is very, very hard on people who hurt kids. If you get the opportunity, you should kill yourself."
"For critics of the criminal justice system, the arrest and imprisonment rates for blacks and other minorities suggest that the system discriminates against those groups. They argue, for example, that blacks, who make up 12 percent of the national population, could not possibly commit 48 percent of the crime: Yet that is exactly what arrest and imprisonment rates imply about black criminality. Defenders of the system argue that the arrest and imprisonment rates do not lie; the system simply reacts to the prevalence of crime in the black community. As we have noted repeatedly, prior research has not settled this controversy. For every study that finds discrimination in arrests, convictions, sentencing, prison treatment, or parole, another denies it."
"Research on sentence patterns lends support to the contention that the system "values" whites more than it does minorities. For example, Zimring, Eigen, and O'Malley (1976) found that black defendants who killed whites received life imprisonment or the death sentence more than twice as often as blacks who killed blacks. Other research has found this relationship for other crimes as well: Defendants receive harsher sentences if the victim is white and lesser sentences if he or she is black. If harsher sentences do indicate that minority status equals lower status in the criminal justice system, that equation may also help explain why minorities serve longer terms, all other things held equal, than white prisoners."
"Nor stony tower, nor walls of beaten brass, Nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron, Can be retentive to the strength of spirit; But life, being weary of these worldly bars, Never lacks power to dismiss itself."
"I have been studying how I may compare This prison where I live unto the world: And for because the world is populous And here is not a creature but myself, I cannot do it; yet I'll hammer it out."
"Might I but through my prison once a day Behold this maid: all corners else o' the earth Let liberty make use of; space enough Have I in such a prison."
"And, for thou wast a spirit too delicate To act her earthy and abhorr'd commands, Refusing her grand hests, she did confine thee, By help of her more potent ministers And in her most unmitigable rage, Into a cloven pine; within which rift Imprison'd thou didst painfully remain A dozen years; within which space she died And left thee there; where thou didst vent thy groans As fast as mill-wheels strike."
"Once you're in prison, there are plenty of jobs, and, if you don't want to work, they beat you up and throw you in the hole. If every state had to pay workers to do the jobs prisoners are forced to do , the salaries would amount to billions. License plates alone would amount to millions. When Jimmy Carter was governor of Georgia, he brought a Black woman from prison to clean the state house and babysit Amy. Prisons are a profitable business. The are a way of legally perpetuating slavery. In every state more and more prisons are being built and even more are on the drawing board. Who are they for? they certainly aren't planning to put white people in them. Prisons are part of this government's genocidal war against Black and Third World people."
"It took a sleepless week of data crunching, but I eventually tracked down the location of my friends - locked away in the mysterious towers of Prague. At the moment, they're the unwilling guests of Interpol's most renowned prison warden - the Contessa. While still a criminal psychology student, she entered into a whirlwind romance and married a wealthy aristocrat. Sadly, the union was short-lived, as the general "suspiciously" died a few weeks after the ceremony. The widowed Contessa put her education and newly acquired estate to work by opening a criminal rehabilitation center. Her pioneering use of hypnotherapy has produced some good results and subsequently earned her a prominent position within Interpol. My friends are locked up somewhere in the clinic and are slated for the Contessa's "good samaritan" brainwashing. If I don't bust them out soon, they'll be working a 9-to-5 job selling shoes and I'll be out 2 best friends!"
"Life in Prison was pretty boring for Hamas guys. We were not allowed to play cards. We were supposed to limit our reading to the Qu'r'an or Islamic books. The other factions were allowed a lot more freedom than we were."
"If they lock me up, at least I'll have a place to stay."
"If a captive mind is unaware of being in prison, it is living in error. If it has recognized the fact, even for the tenth of a second, and then quickly forgotten it in order to avoid suffering, it is living in falsehood. Men of the most brilliant intelligence can be born, live and die in error and falsehood. In them, intelligence is neither a good, nor even an asset. The difference between more or less intelligent men is like the difference between criminals condemned to life imprisonment in smaller or larger cells. The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like a condemned man who is proud of his large cell."
"I never saw sad men who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue We prisoners called the sky, And at every careless cloud that passed In happy freedom by."
"The Americans have always been more open to my ideas. In fact, I could earn a living in America just by lecturing. One of my brightest audiences, incidentally, were the prisoners in a Philadelphia gaol — brighter than my students at university."
"In durance vile here must I wake and weep, And all my frowsy couch in sorrow steep."
"Whene'er with haggard eyes I view This dungeon that I'm rotting in, I think of those companions true Who studied with me at the U- Niversity of Göttingen."
"Prison'd in a parlour snug and small, Like bottled wasps upon a southern wall."
"As if a wheel had been in the midst of a wheel."
"In durance vile."
"That which the world miscalls a jail, A private closet is to me. * * * * * Locks, bars, and solitude together met, Make me no prisoner, but an anchoret."
"In testimony to the Sentencing Commission and Congress, and in other public statements about sexual assaults by officers, DOJ leaders said they have asked for harsher prison sentences for officers who abuse the people they are supposed to protect. And the new director of the Bureau of Prisons says she is reviewing how wardens are selected and supervised, and are installing more cameras inside the facilities. For Kevin Ring, who advocates for people in prison and their families, the scandal at the Dublin prison underscores why independent oversight is needed. "You are not going to clean it up through individual investigations," said Ring, the president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums. "You have to change the culture and you have to get rid of the concealment and bring some transparency and sunlight into the prison system.""
"The Department of Justice is committed to rooting out sexual assault within the BOP and continuing to prioritize cases involving sexual abuse of individuals in BOP custody."
"The experts confirm it doesn't matter if you're moved to a different prison, it doesn't matter if they're offered the very best therapy possible, the Bureau of Prisons is a fundamentally unsafe place for a survivor of sexual violence to recover from."
"The United States now has the highest in the Western world, the in the entire world, and one of the lowest turnout rates in elections among developed countries."
"Incarceration in prison or a local jail sets poor people up for exploitation in a forced labor system. New Deal laws once prohibited the use of prison labor except for state institutions. Businesses won the right to use prison labor in 1979. They won an exception from minimum wage laws for prison workers in 1995. This led to the employment of hundreds of thousands of inmates of federal and state prisons for mere pennies per hour. Many are forced to work in unsafe conditions without protective equipment, because workplace health and safety laws do not apply to prison workers."
"Presently, there are 2.3 million people housed in the country’s prisons, jails and other criminal-justice facilities. By most measures, this number is remarkable. It means that the U.S. has the largest prison population in the world. China comes in second, imprisoning 1.7 million people–over half a million fewer people than the U.S., in a country of 1.4 billion. The U.S. number translates to the imprisonment of 698 people for every 100,000. This rate dwarfs the incarceration rates of the countries that the U.S. usually thinks of as its peers. Indeed, the rate at which the U.S. incarcerates its population is roughly six times the highest rate of incarceration among Western European nations. While these numbers, in and of themselves, might be disconcerting, they become even more disturbing when we consider the racial geography of the U.S.’s prison population: people of color, particularly black people, are disproportionately represented among those who are incarcerated. While black people constitute 12% of the U.S. population, they constitute 33% of the prison population. Thus, black people are dramatically overrepresented in the country’s prisons and jails. Meanwhile, white people make up 64% of the U.S. population, but they make up just 30% of the prison population."
"Mass incarceration means that this country approaches its problems through the criminal-justice system. When faced with a social ill, our nation responds by building more prisons and jails. Because incarceration is the tool that we use to address societal problems, we have erected few limitations on the police’s ability to keep the social order. Police can stop whomever they want to stop whenever they want to stop them. They can investigate things that have no relation to the reason for the stop. They can use force. They can kill."
"Today, America ranks among the most punitive states in world history — second only to the Soviet Union under Stalin."
"If we are right that the overdevelopment of the American penal state is a symptom of the underdevelopment of the American social policy, meaningful reform is in large part the task of winning redistribution from ruling elites. It will be costly. And there will thus be losers, who will resist it. The end of American mass incarceration is not a technical problem for which there are smart, straightforward, but just not-yet-realized solutions. Rather, it is a political problem, the solution of which will require confronting the entrenched power of the wealthy. In this sense, the task before us is to build the capacities of poor and working-class Americans to win redress from their exploiters."
"The American prison system has no equal in any other country or any other epoch. Almost 2 million people sit in our prisons and jails each day. Another 3.7 million are on probation or parole. Hidden behind the system's vague abstractions — justice, law and order — is the fact that the overwhelming majority of America's current and former prisoners are very poor. By the time they reach their mid-thirties, almost seven in ten black men who didn't finish high school will have spent a portion of their life in a cage. Prison robs people of the prime of their life, taking not only the sleepy, slow years at the end but also the pulsing, hot years in the middle. In prisons, of course, they will remain poor, earning in their prison jobs between 14 cents and 1.41 an hour on average, depending on the state. The United States doesn't just tuck its poor under overpasses and into mobile home parks far removed from central business districts. It disappears them into jails and prisons, effectively erasing them: The incarcerated are simply not counted in most national surveys, resulting in a falsely rosy statistical picture of American progress. Poverty measures exclude everyone in prison and jail — not to mention those housed in psych wards, halfway houses, and homeless shelters - which means there are millions more poor Americans than official statistics let on."
"More than two million people in the United States are behind bars, a higher rate of incarceration than any other country in the world, constituting a new Jim Crow. The total population in prison is nearly equal to the number of people in , Texas, the fourth largest U.S. city. African Americans and make up 56 percent of those incarcerated, while constituting only about 32 percent of the U.S. population."
"We myopically serve the rapacious appetites of those dedicated to exploitation and maximizing profit. And our corporate masters view prisons — as they do education, health care and war — as a business."
"Our , which holds 2.3 million prisoners, or 25 percent of the world’s prison population, makes money by keeping prisons full. It demands bodies, regardless of color, gender or ethnicity. As the system drains the pool of black bodies, it has begun to incarcerate others. Women—the fastest-growing segment of the prison population—are swelling prisons, as are poor whites in general, Hispanics and immigrants. Prisons are no longer a black-white issue. Prisons are a grotesque manifestation of corporate capitalism. Slavery is legal in prisons under the 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. It reads: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States." And the massive U.S. prison industry functions like the forced labor camps that have existed in all totalitarian states."
"Most people don’t quite relate US prisons to government sponsored torture. We can thank the mainstream corporate media and politicians for this. Since the 1960s and 1970s they’ve persistently projected the false image of US prisons as resorts where criminal predators eat chips, lift weights, and watch videos all day, much like the images given of slavery as an experience that Black folks actually enjoyed. These false images are sustainable because the real world of prisons is a hidden one, concealed behind walls and razor wire, inaccessible to the public."
"My second thesis is that we must re-link shifts in penal and social policy, instead of isolating them from one another. The downsizing of public aid, complemented by the shift from the right to welfare to obligation of workfare (that is, forced participation in sub par employment as a condition of support), and the upsizing of the prison are the two sides of the same coin. Together, workfare and prisonfare effect the double regulation of poverty in the age of deepening economic inequality and diffusing social insecurity."
"Any-and-anything went. Anything from heroin to whiskey to Italian food was sold and traded in the jail. Homosexual rape, bribery and murder were the bill of fare. [And] no one seemed to give a damn."