Quotes About Imprisonment

Only to those who have been in prison does freedom have such great meaning.

We are all prisoner, but the name of our cure is not freedom

I am caught like a beast at bay. Somewhere are people, freedom, light, But all I hear is the baying of the pack, There is no way out for me.

Thus I alone, where all my freedom grew, In prison pine with bondage and restraint; And with remembrance of the greater grief To banish the less, I find my chief relief.

The human soul finds its saddest imprisonment when it is helpless in the presence of cruelty, when it cannot right a wrong. It finds its highest freedom when it can secure justice to others.

The smell of baking bread wafts up to my cell and reminds me of the days I walked freely in the cafes. This tears me apart more than my fear of death or the solitude in which I now find myself.

My occupation now, I suppose, is jail inmate.

A political prisoner is someone who is out fighting for his or her people's rights and freedom and is imprisoned for that alone.

In Genoa, the word, libertas can be read on the front of prisons and on the fetters of galley-slaves. The application of this motto is fine and just.

Abu-Jamal, serving a life-sentence now in the Pennsylvania prison, after over 29 years on death row, observes this about prison time: "Once loving relationships wither into yesterday's dust. Relatives die, their loss mourned in silent loneliness. Times, temperaments, mores change, and the caged move to outdated rhythms.

In the current ethos of privatization, the incarcerated are often soaked even further with fees for their own imprisonment, sometimes including their housing, also food, supplies, and even medical lab fees. Corporations

Time in prison—not just in solitary—becomes "a thick dull mallet that pounds consciousness into a coma.

The mind-numbing, soul-killing savage sameness that makes each day an echo of the day before, with neither thought nor hope of growth, makes prison the abode of Spirit death that it is for over a million men and women now held in U.S. hell holes.

The U.S. still confines a higher proportion of its citizens than any other country, and no other nation, in law professor Michelle Alexander's words, "incarcerates such an astonishing percentage of its racial or ethnic minorities.

A few of the confined, especially with succor from the outside as well as inside, will tap the grandeur of mind and spirit to fight off this spirit death and guard their humanity. Many others, though, will descend into the hellhole of prison-life to become themselves, even if released, a hell-making force. Or perhaps as is even more frequent, they remain so steeped in trauma and the prison's pervasive dread that they are without resources for life when released. They

An economic order rooted in a system of production that tolerates and depends upon hierarches of class and race will have to devise systems of control and punishment to deal with social dynamite. This need to control yields the kind of policing, imprisoning, and executing we see today in the political theatrics of state terror, both to move aside those seen as "social junk," and to remove and "neutralize" those seen as "social dynamite.

For once I myself saw with my own eyes      the Sibyl at Cumae hanging in a cage,          and when the boys said to her,              Ã¢â'¬Å"Sibyl what do you want?"          she replied, "I want to die." T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also prison.

What do you have when you have an agent buried up to his neck in sand? Not enough sand.

Asia is an entertainment, Europe is a dream, America is an imprisonment and Rest is a nightmare.

I thought you came down right on the side of go directly to jail, do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars.

The weariest and most loathed worldly life, that age, ache, penury and imprisonment can lay on nature is a paradise, to what we fear of death.

Stalag Rhythm

I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.