Jail Quotes

Jail has become the biggest mental health hospital.

~ Steven Magee

The best stories will come from jail, the people which are in the prison, also and from the victims.

~ Deyth Banger

Once in jail or you just go in prison for a reason you don't have rights... So be wise, think twice and don't go there!

~ Deyth Banger

A mosaic of memories takes me back to my own childhood, and then to my children. My earliest memory of St. Augustine was a day trip from Jacksonville; a day with some neighbors who were nice enough to purchase me a plastic toy-tugboat with a blue superstructure and white hull. Other accounts meld into my adult years. With its history and attractions, The Ancient City is pristine and picturesque by most accounts; but from the Newer Jail (not the Old Jail) , the perspective is very different.

~ H. Kirk Rainer

rip the prisonsopenput theconvictsontelevision

~ Norman Mailer

He who has never tasted jail Lives well within the legal pale, While he who's served a heavy sentence Renews the racket, not repentance.

~ Ogden Nash

She is shocked by the rows of thick Plexiglas windows, each equipped with a telephone, each with a prisoner on one side and an outsider on the other. There is a teenage girl chatting with a prisoner who is presumably her father. There’s a married couple talking to their daughter. There’s a woman with a baby in her arms, sobbing into her phone as she begs her husband not to plead guilty for his crimes. Jail is terrifying to Geraldine, not only because it’s a house of criminals but also because it’s a cold slap in the face, a reminder of where she will eventually end up. “You’ve got to stay with me the whole time, Callo! I’m serious, you CANNOT leave me here.”“I’ll never,” Callo vows, but he’s eyeing her strangely. “Just remember which side of the glass you’re on right now, Geraldine.

~ Rebecca Mcnutt

Contentment sounds ideal; and ignorance is bliss! But what remains of truth, justice and liberty? Why can millions of parent do what I did, and not give the law a consideration? Why do I have to suffer the losses of divorce—the pain and sorrow so accompanied the plight of once-parent, now non-custodial? So much more could be preceded by “why”—so as to leave nothing more. To speak, or think, of these many questions is to sound like I’m whining. But I am whining, about why….

~ H. Kirk Rainer

Roughly a month into my stay in jail, I began the first of twelve letters. The choice of titles had much to do with my reason (or circumstances) for being incarcerated: I was a parent of a past-marriage; and though the courts had dissolved the marriage long ago, the matter of parenting was still being debated (by me)—but prohibited by the courts. I had to accept the possibility that my days as a father might be behind me while remaining dutiful to the possibility that, at anytime, circumstances could change. On the one hand, I am a former-father, but on the other hand, I cannot be anything but a father to my children—at any age.

~ H. Kirk Rainer

I begin the chapter and book on very elementary reasoning and a simple description: this description of relationships developed naturally and socially, this reasoning that such relationships have long-existed and are very important—even eternal to those called 'special people'. My own freedom to choose this elementary reasoning has something to do with firsthand experience as one whose role has been reduced to the realm of illegal…with all the punishment. Such reasoning has consumed me in moments and has prevailed for as long as my role has been at risk.

~ H. Kirk Rainer

A faraway-father is distant from his children; not necessarily in geography, but socially—either by choice or by force. Our country has many fathers who are figuratively-forced far and away from their families. Legal force brings to bear disparate dads through such innovations as no-fault divorce, legal precedence, and post-divorce incrimination. I am one of these parents—portrayed or profiled as 'perpetrator'.

~ H. Kirk Rainer

The United States is like one big jail for Black people, because we're locked into a mentality and a mindset that limits our potential. It has us against us.

~ Chuck D

She took my papers, the papers that had followed me from the Khobar police station to jail, and pointed at a place where I was supposed to sign. On the paper there was a line for charges. In the blank space, someone had written “driving while female.

~ Manal Al-Sharif

How beautiful it is to live in a world with no walls.

~ Manal Al-Sharif

We were like captive animals that had lost the will to fight. We even went so far as to defend the very constraints that they hadimposed upon us.

~ Manal Al-Sharif

School is a jail, people want there a lot of and when you are out of school what you know from school you remember few and it's useless. So far 12 years at school... (Take it 12 years at jail!)

~ Deyth Banger

My association of jail to high school is probably on the basic similarity of a communicable social-setting. These few settings represent a frame of reference: a somewhat fraternal order (though I never belonged to an actual fraternity) where people collect—and may be confined—and somewhat coalesce on a common cause. Jail was a remarkable and unique experience of fellows/fathers and a force of several….

~ H. Kirk Rainer

I whispered across the bars to Jackaby as I rose, Shall I tell them the truth?Have you killed anyone? he asked, quietly.No, of course not!Then I can't imagine why you shouldn't.

~ William Ritter

Maria, it sounds like he was insane. Rational people don't intentionally addict people. I feel sorry for those poor people who were unsuspecting victims.

~ Dianne Harman Cornered Coyote

Taking a life, is not worth getting life in prison.

~ Anthony Liccione

He'd searched every corner of his mind looking for ways to avoid a rendezvous with Chico. In the last twenty years, Slade had come a long way from the ghetto orphanage where he'd grown up, but the only way he could help Maria was to get in touch with Chico. Slade remembered the last time he'd seen Chico as though it was yesterday.

~ Dianne Harman Cornered Coyote

I could tell he wanted the best for me. Of course, he assumed that would be getting out. Everyone always thought that, not of what we had to go back to, at home. Maybe our parents had thrown away our mattresses. Maybe they'd told our siblings we'd been run over by trains, to make our absence fonder.Not everyone had a parent. It could be that nothing was waiting for us. Our keys would no longer fit the locks. We'd resort to ringing the bell, saying we've come home, can't we come in?The eye in the peephole would show itself, and that eye could belong to a stranger, as our family had moved halfway across the country and never informed us. Or that eye could belong to the woman who carried us for nine months, who labored for fourteen hours, who was sliced open with a C-section to give us life, and now wished she never did.The juvenile correctional system could let us out into the world, but it could not control who would be out there, willing to claim us.

~ Nova Ren Suma

The Brinktown jail is one of the most ingenious ever propounded by civic authorities. It must be remembered that Brinktown occupies the surface of a volcanic butte, overlooking a trackless jungle of quagmire, thorn, eel-vine skiver tussock. A single road leads from city down to jungle; the prisoner is merely locked out of the city. Escape is at his option; he may flee as far through the jungle as he sees fit: the entire continent is at his disposal. But no prisoner ever ventures far from the gate; and, when his presence is required, it is only necessary to unlock the gate and call his name.

~ Jack Vance

A gut full of heroin and the looming possibility of bunking in an overcrowded cell in Kerobokan to await my death makes you feel a bit sorry for some of the things you've done.

~ S.a. Tawks

If the holy spirit is in you, you are free, even if you are in a physical jail

~ Sunday Adelaja

When I first went to prison, I made the best out of it. From the streets, I was hearing reports of Rebellions going to prison and getting do in [beat up]. Our fellas had no say, couldn’t even open up their mouths. When I went up there for the first time, I turned that prison into a place that everyone could say that the Rebellions were running it after that. I wouldn’t say I did it alone, but I help set the groundwork to give the Rebellions a say in prison. Scrooge, former leader of the Rebellion Raiders street gang that once boasted of having some ten thousand members

~ Drexel Deal

It was a survival thing: he didn't answer back, didn't say anything about job security for prison guards, debate the nature of repentance, rehabilitation, or rates of recidivism. He didn't say anything funny or clever, and, to be on the safe side, when he was talking to a prison official, whenever possible, he didn't say anything at all. Speak when you're spoken to. Do your own time. Get out. Go home. ... Rebuild a life.

~ Neil Gaiman

I'd never opened up the gas station if it had been someone else, but I know Tucker's fond of you. It's a shame you don't keep in touch with the old man.

~ Dianne Harman Cornered Coyote

Mom and dad probably told you I've been arrested. I'm innocent. I want you to know that.

~ Dianne Harman Cornered Coyote

I love you he said. I did not say anything. What could I say? If i said i love you too, i had perpetual punishment for being a liar.

~ Arzum Uzun

Before you are much older...you will have policemen here to stay. A magistrate will be next. Then perhaps even a jail. And the counterparts of those things are hunger and want, and misery and idleness. The night is coming. Watch and pray.

~ Richard Llewellyn

So a while back I spent a night in jail. Now, as for exactly what landed me there, I’d be so delighted to never have to go into any of the details regarding that. Besides, other people’s theories are so much more exotic and exciting than the reality. I've heard everything from 'attempted terrorism' to 'indecent public condescension.

~ Phillip Andrew Bennett Low

During the days I felt myself slipping into a kind of madness. Solitary confinement has an astonishing effect on the mind. The trip was to stay calm and keep myself occupied. I spent hours working out how to break free. But trying to escape would have been instant suicide.

~ Tahir Shah

...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

To live with unforgiveness is to become a captive cultured citizen whose taxation is that of demonically ticketed torment.

~ Tracey Bond

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

I began to notice something strange about the nature of incarceration; in particular, its imposition on the minds and bodies of the imprisoned, promoting a number of inmates to take personal responsibility for a system of failure beyond their control—a system built on hiding in plain sight the institutional, historical, and material limits of personal choice….Taking on the failures of a system without critically examining the limits of personal choice often led a number of cellmates to conflate their sense of responsibility with issues beyond their control.--Kalaniopua Young, “From a Native Trans Daughter

~ Eric Stanley

Don't promote yourself as a country of constitutionality and compassion if you honestly believe that putting people in prison and treating them like animals is justified. Stop all the hype that we live in a free and democratic society. I used to ramble on about the same stuff. But now—are we really a country that believes in fairness and compassion? Are we really a country that treats people fairly? I've met good men—yes, good men—in prison who made mistakes out of stupidity or ignorance, greed, or just bad judgment, but they did not need to be sent to prison to be punished; eighteen months for catching too many fish; two years for inflating income on a mortgage application; three months for selling a whale's tooth on eBay; fifteen years for a first-time nonviolent drug conspiracy in which no drugs were found or seized. There are thousands of people like these in our prisons today, costing American taxpayers billions of dollars when these individuals could be punished in smarter, alternative ways. Our courts are overpunishing decent people who make mistakes, and our prisons have no rewards or incentives for good behavior. In this alone criminal justice and prison systems contradict their own mission statements (244).

~ Bernard B. Kerik

Three year in prison and a dick is just another thing to put up your ass.

~ Marlon James

That’s the ironic thing about time, Doc. One the one hand, we don’t have much of it for this, but it’s all I have in here.

~ Kenneth Eade