Prisoner Quotes

So what causes men to become violent? I’ll tell you, boredom, silly rules, muggy screws and pathetic governors. What else can we do - swallow it, wipe our mouths out. You have to fight for your rights. Not sit back and take it.

~ Stephen Richards

Violence leads to madness, it fills you with crazy thoughts. You sleep it, eat it and shit it. You become a time bomb. They push you a bit more – you blow up. They beat you and you survive. You get strong and you blow again. So how long can a man live this way? I’ll tell you…until he dies, if need be. It becomes a way of life, but I don’t remember it, why? Simple…it’s painful; it’s empty and alone. Your cell becomes a hole in the earth, it sucks you in. You drown in your own bitterness, it’s not right to live this way.

~ Stephen Richards

Prison madness is much the same! Insanity is plentiful in prisons. These days with the drug culture it’s not a lot of difference, as a lot of convicts make themselves psychotic and paranoid. Many end up killers, all over petty and minor problems. Where men would once squabble, fight and kill over a ½ oz of bacca they now do the same over a gram of white powder or a bag of brown!

~ Stephen Richards

Urges like the loony who enjoys strangling, it’s his buzz. He gets depressed when in seclusion, as he can’t strangle anybody so in the end he hangs himself in turmoil. Their brain can’t handle it. He wants so bad to kill, but they will not let him, so he has to kill himself.

~ Stephen Richards

One lunatic in Rampton used to have bouts of hysteria. Where he would let out a scream, and run at a wall and dive headfirst…crash! He was given a crash helmet! (Well it is a mad house.)

~ Stephen Richards

There is no end. There is no cure. It gets worse with time. Cure. How can you cure an institution, we are bricks crumbling in the walls of despair. Death is inevitable for us all. But the insanity is here to stay.

~ Stephen Richards

The asylum years taught me a lot about myself. Bear in mind I’m the only lunatic in the United Kingdom who spent time in all three max secure asylums, which you should now know are…Rampton, Broadmoor and Ashworth. Don’t ask me which is the best or the worst, as how do you compare insanity with insanity?

~ Stephen Richards

Broadmoor creeps into your blood, the walls touch the sky and the grounds suck you in, they’ve even got their own burial ground. We called it the ‘madman’s hole’, it smelt of fear; a stillness and even the birds seemed to have a stone face like their eyes were made of marble. So many monsters, men of hell, I don’t know how a sane man can keep sane in there.

~ Stephen Richards

Asylums are crazy places, with crazy rules. If you’re not mad when you arrive, you are when you leave. (That’s if you ever leave.) I was lucky…I got slung out; they couldn’t afford to keep me any longer.

~ Stephen Richards

A loon thought he was Frank Sinatra and every time Frank came on TV or radio the loon would go mad, impostor!

~ Stephen Richards

Madness is forever! We even smell different, our hearts don’t beat, they tick, our eyes are different, we don’t just see, we also pick up vibes. We are probably dehumanised and way past our ‘sell by’ date, totally unusable, bitter as lemons.

~ Stephen Richards

He got a lovely pair of trainers given off his mum for Christmas, best pair he ever had, but it was the nylon laces that he couldn’t take his eyes off. They found him hanging in his cell!

~ Stephen Richards

She sat in a secluded room, she was mad, but she could not accept it; so she was neither sane nor insane. She could not be either until she knew herself, so in limbo she must die. She kept stuffing toilet roll into her mouth. They found her choked to death!

~ Stephen Richards

He was a silent type, very nervy of people: shy, introverted, nobody would believe he could scream so loud…well he did drink a bottle of bleach!

~ Stephen Richards

I am a creation of the establishment, I realise I’m not as strong as life itself, but I also realise death will suck me in. The eyes and fingers are pointing in my direction. For me, there is only one way – one road, one signpost; it reads, ‘Hell’. It’s a one-way ticket; there are no brakes on my vehicle, there is no way out, only one way in.

~ Stephen Richards

Sometimes I stare into a pool of piss, I see my reflection, I picture a hole in my face, there’s nothing there, it’s vanished. I watch the maggots turn to flies, and they fly off with bits of flesh from my body. I attempt to wipe it clear from my mind, but the nice thoughts get swallowed up. I can’t think nice for too long…it would destroy me.

~ Stephen Richards

Unlike most I don’t fear prison, never have, never will. Obviously I don’t want it, I hate it, but it’s the hate that drives me on to survive.

~ Stephen Richards

Some of the madmen are really fun to be with. I soon learnt to relate to them. I soon became one of them. I ended up the maddest of the mad. There is no madder than myself! Please believe it.

~ Stephen Richards

A madman overcomes it by adapting to his surroundings. You can’t give up. Why die? There is always another mission, it’s the missions that keep you alive.

~ Stephen Richards

Take outside - freedom. What is it? What does it mean to a madman? I’ll tell you, we go years through a lifetime with no love, no sex, no nice food and no nice clothes. So when it comes…we choke on it! The kindness strangles us; we can’t cope, so we make pigs of ourselves.

~ Stephen Richards

Madness is a bowl of poison cherries, chew them and die, but you die screaming in agony.

~ Stephen Richards

A doctor once asked me: 'Charlie, what do you think your problem is?' “Doc,' I said, '…you’re the problem!

~ Stephen Richards

You get used to the brain being squeezed. At nighttime in the darkness of your emptiness, it seems to swell back up and gives you some peace. In the darkness even the pain is not so bad. A bruise heals. (Time is the treatment.) But it’s your mind that’s tortured. Your thoughts are in turmoil and despair. Feelings of awesome revenge and destruction manifest themselves.

~ Stephen Richards

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

Just imagine, you’re on a stretcher in the hospital, being wheeled to the operating theatre, they inject you, put you to sleep…anaesthetic. You drift into blackness, you’re out and you’re the closest yet to death. Then a surgeon cuts into your body, rips you open, goes deep inside. Looks within, pulls a bit out, puts bits in, sews you up. Then! If you’re lucky, you awake! Some don’t wake, this is my point, will you wake? Why should you? How can you? That’s the black hole of madness you’re in! Screaming to get out: ‘Alive’ or just ‘Sane’! You want out of it, you want to see the light!

~ Stephen Richards

You can grow up being a troublemaker and then before you know it the next thing you’re doing is listening to Frank Zappa whilst chilling out…now that’s the intelligent way out. What would a psychiatrist say about that?

~ Stephen Richards

Just take my advice and stay away from those psychiatrists they’re dangerous. And if you’re 13 years old and sitting in front of one do what I never…chin him ‘cos if you don’t you’ll live to regret it. You talk to your mum and dad (they know you best) and keep your problems in the family.

~ Stephen Richards

Is Bronson mad! Let me ask you! How else can I be? I’m probably the maddest guy on two legs if the truth was known, but prison will never beat me, I’d sooner die today than allow it too!

~ Stephen Richards

Ever see moors murderer Ian Brady, study his photos, study Black, study Cannon, study Sutcliffe - study them all! Who says evil is not recognisable?

~ Stephen Richards

Insanity can be a heavy cross to bear; I mean look at all those people in loony bins compared to those that are free and walking the streets – a tiny percentage are classed as mad. The incidence of mental problems amongst people is said to be rising, so what do they go and do, they cut the amount of asylums by half! Whoever makes these decisions has to be a loon and a half!

~ Stephen Richards

There are different categories of madmen, and different types of asylums! I know absolutely nothing about the asylums that house the madman who thinks he is a space man. Would you believe that 90% of madmen are treated in outside clinics?

~ Stephen Richards

Ask anybody, would you want an ex-madman living next door? It’s difficult enough being an ex-convict. It’s double hard for us ‘madmen’. Please believe it.

~ Stephen Richards

They ask themselves: “What will he do?” “How will he react?” “Will he go mad?” “Will he bite?” “Will he be armed?” They’re pumped up with fear. Adrenaline pumping, fingers tense on the trigger, brains racing. And I’m cool as a cat! The name ‘Charles Bronson’ causes panic! The name ‘Mickey Peterson’ causes stress! The police all love to arrest me, as I’m the most exciting madman they will ever arrest! It’s a fact. So here I am years later, and I’m still the madman. There is no escaping my past.

~ Stephen Richards

Looking back at the years I spent in the asylums, I’m now convinced some of that insanity rubbed off onto me!

~ Stephen Richards

Mad people are very emotionally orientated! They have complex feelings, they’re easily upset, but are also easy to please! Most mad people have lonely lives, as nobody understands them. So they become “Lost Souls.” They dream a lot. Go within their minds to search - some will turn strange, become dangerous. So a madman is created! His world becomes a mission.

~ Stephen Richards

I’ve been an inmate in Broadmoor, Rampton and Ashworth. I was one of ‘them’. I was once Britain’s most unstable madman! This book is a complete one off! If you’re a nervous type of reader then don’t read it. You’ve been warned! You are now entering the world of insanity; please keep hold of your sanity until the book comes to a stop!

~ Stephen Richards

In the case of Albertine, I felt that I should never discover anything, that, out of that tangled mass of details of fact and falsehood, I should never unravel the truth: and that it would always be so, unless I were to shut her up in prison (but prisoners escape) until the end.

~ Marcel Proust

Sometimes I think you're still a prisoner. You're not free of this place in your head, Nathan. And you're definitely not free of those people. They haunt you.

~ Sally Green

You are as free as a prisoner in an open air prison

~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

If one has never known freedom, it is easy to be blind to the gridirons composing one's cell.

~ Nenia Campbell