Prison Quotes

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 had heard of offices feeling like prisons, but in this case our prison felt, rather anticlimactically, like an office.

~ William Ritter

Merry Christmas me bollocks. The words of the Pogues's 'Fairytale of New York' also came to mind: surrounded by scumbags and maggots, I prayed God it would be my last in Los Teques.

~ Paul Keany

Don't tell me what to do - you have eight numbers after your name just like me.

~ Piper Kerman

Prison is a process, a succession of imprisonments. At first it operates only on a physical level, restricting your movement. Later, it extends to the psychological plane, encompassing your very perception. You come to exclude all thoughts, all visions of the free world.

~ Norman Parker

A major challenge of this movement is to do the work that will create more humane, habitable environments for people in prison without bolstering the permanence of the prison system. How, then, do we accomplish this balancing act of passionately attending to the needs of prisoners- calling for less violent conditions, an end to state sexual assault, improved physical and mental health care, greater access to drug programs, better educational work opportunities, unionization of prison labor, more connections with families and communities, shorter or alternative sentencing- and at the same time call for alternatives to sentencing altogether, no more prison construction, and abolitionist strategies that question the place of prison in our future?

~ Angela Y. Davis

People imprison themselves.

~ Bruce Crown

Prison is designed to break one's spirit and destroy one's resolve. To do this, the authorities attempt to exploit every weakness, demolish every initiative, negate all signs of individuality--all with the idea of stamping out that spark that makes each of us human and each of us who we are.

~ Nelson Mandela

This extraordinary tale of madness, leading up to Stephen being sectioned off to the lunatic asylum at Broadmoor, also reveals Stephen’s eventual fight to win his freedom from the asylum, which saw his legal team mount a successful challenge against the ‘criminally insane’ label that was keeping him in Broadmoor. Moyle’s legal team successfully argued that he was either a criminal or insane, he could not be both.

~ Stephen Richards

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

During the interim, no matter how much agony the man may feel, he also experiences excitement, the excitement of learning how to cope with a closed society that reflects free society as a funhouse mirror reflects the human form: everything is there, but distorted.

~ Edward Bunker

Once the cons were in the cell, they’d pull razors or homemade daggers out and rob the YOs of their trainers, leather jackets or jewellery. You couldn’t placate them; it would be akin to expecting not to be bitten from a Rhodesian Ridgeback whilst petting it! Bar L was full of rough, colourful and out-of-control junkies who wouldn’t think twice about stabbing you or slashing you just to get what you had on your feet to pay for their next hit of smack.

~ Stephen Richards

The worst prison is not made of metal bars. The worst prison is when your internal reality does not match your external reality.

~ Yasmin Mogahed

I also become the local computer nerd. The administration brings me in to fix all the computers, I create viruses to invade at a specific day and time. They call me in, and I eradicate my own virus, only to plant another one to go into effect a couple months later. They ask me why I can't just fix the computers once and for all. I tell them to quit going to porn sites and it will stay fixed. That shuts them up every time.

~ Darynda Jones

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

You did it! You are free!!!!!!!!

~ Paige Garland

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

You have to remember, William. It may make the difference between freedom and half a lifetime in prison.

~ Kenneth Eade

Whattaya mean you ain’t no criminal lawyer? You a lawyer right? And you in here, that means you also a criminal.

~ Kenneth Eade

There is a tremendous amount of farting in prison.

~ Charlie Engle

I thought that exile meant you had to leave your country and you could go anywhere--somewhere in the sun, a tropical island, say, or America. But exile doesn't mean that; it means you are banished to a specific place, and guess what, that place isn't in the sun and is no paradise, it's not even America. It's some cold, miserable place like Siberia, where you don't know anyone and you can barely survive. It's another prison.

~ Sally Green

In prison, you learn to count each day and each moment. You even count the bad 'meals' and the unbearable ones.

~ Abdullah Abu Snaineh

Don't forget either, you unhappy man, that voluntary confinement is a great deal harder to bear than compulsory.

~ Anton Chekhov

That is just what life is when it is beautiful and happy - a game! Naturally, one can also do all kinds of other things with it, make a duty of it, or a battleground, or a prison, but that does not make it any prettier...

~ Hermann Hesse

Truth shrilled in prison or cemetary.

~ Toba Beta

4 levels of Education, 1.mom & dad 2.education 3. medication 4. Prison.

~ Donnie Harold Harris

All the studies and all the research in the field of criminology affirm that prison education is the least expensive and most effective solution to overcrowding and strain on the budget caused by recevidism.

~ Christopher Zoukis

[Lord Horror] was so unique and radical, I expected to go to prison for it. I always thought that if you wrote a truly dangerous book -- something dangerous would happen to you. Which is one reason there are so few really dangerous books around. Publishers play at promoting dangerous books, whether they're Serpent's Tail or Penguin. All you get is a book vetted by committee, never anything radically imaginative or offensive that will take your fucking head off. Ironically, I think it would do other authors a power of good if they had to account for their books by going to prison -- there are far too many bad books being published!

~ David Britton

I know a little bit about trying to do the right thing and fucking up completely. I added.You talking about mom? Ben saidI was talking about me.You could have been talking about all of us. Ben pressed his hand against the glass and my brother and I matched palms.

~ Gillian Flynn

Great institutions have leaders who are proud of what they do, and who engage with everyone who makes up those institutions, so each person understands their role. But our jailers are generally granted near-total anonymity, like the cartoon executioner who wears a hood to conceal his identity. What is the point, what is the reason, to lock people away for years, when it seems to mean so very little, even to the jailers who hold the key? How can a prisoner understand their punishment to have been worthwhile to anyone, when it's dealt in a way so offhand and indifferent?

~ Piper Kerman

When you spend your life taking care of mudmen, you can't help getting a little dirty yourself.

~ Stephen King

When a friend of mine boasted about living in a gated community, I thought he meant Folsom, and I wondered whether he knew Charles Manson.

~ Ron Brackin

I also knew Dell was a good boy with bad friends. I was one of them, and I worried about leading him astray. But in those early years he made me feel cleaner, somehow; like all the shit we’d gone through wasn’t so bad. Like I could deal with it, so long as he was by my side. It had always been the way – but still, I was sure Dell would disappear one day. I had nightmares about what I would do if they released him before me on good behaviour, if he should leave me behind in this fucked up limbo of our youth. Nightmares where if I didn’t hold on to him, those long legs would take him away somewhere better...

~ H. Alazhar

Golden bars make no less a prisonthan a coffin on a hill.And in caged reformation,one wanders aimless still.The rafters now a recollectionof sacred suppression.How the morning dawnstrikes mourning confession.Now Death yields a harvestof the living masses.We walk toward its pathno earthly power surpasses.

~ Craig Froman

When you are born into bondage you can't see the prison.

~ Bryant Mcgill

The County Jail looked like a tall, forbidding elementary school. Seven stories of dirty brown brick, one hundred years old and now operating at 330 percent of capacity.

~ Richard Price

No sun cream or condoms, just in case you’re looking at the lady-boys. There’s plenty of AIDS lingering about and every STD you can imagine.

~ Simon Palmer

The world is a prison for the believer and paradise for a non-believer.

~ Anonymous

I like visiting people in prison. I can say whatever I want to them, and they can’t do anything about it.

~ Brandon Sanderson