Quotes About Incarceration

If incarceration had come to define the lives of men from impoverished black neighborhoods, eviction was shaping the lives of women. Poor black men were locked up. Poor black women were locked out.

When you are in prison, you have but one desire: freedom. If you fall ill in prison, you do not think about freedom - you think about health. Health is, therefore, more important than freedom.

I'm a part of major league rugby. We had a league meeting to decide what to do with anthem protests, and even though I personally agree with what they say they are protesting as inequality and judicial system and incarceration rates among minorities, we decided all should stand and respect every national anthem.

I get a lot of letters from prisoners. They say things you can't imagine.

I have friends in prison. I send them money. I send them food. They say, 'Bro, get me out of here.' There's nothing I can do. They're five years in on a 20-year sentence. They went in at 16, they'll get out at 36. That's a lifetime.

Thieves must sit in prison.

Sending Paris Hilton to jail for being the most loathed celeprosy lesion in the history of the species seems like a happening idea at first - forty-five days at Century Regional Detention Center is so the new thirty days at Promises Malibu! But it sets a dangerous precedent to jail celebs just because someone hates them.

If you are born in America with a black skin, you're in prison

You don't have to go behind bars to be in jail in this country. If you are born in this country with black skin you are already in jail, you are already confined, you are already watched over by a warden who poses as your mayor and poses as your governor and poses as your President.

Any person who claims to have deep feeling for other human beings should think a long, long time before he votes to have other men kept behind bars—caged. I am not saying there shouldn't be prisons, but there shouldn't be bars. Behind bars, a man never reforms. He will never forget. He never will get completely over the memory of the bars.

A prison does not only lock its inmates inside, it keeps all others out. Her strongest prison is of her own construction.

At first the solution was to build more prisons and cram more people into them, but that soon became prohibitively expensive. (Here Ed flicks through a few more slides.) Not only that, it resulted in platoons of prison graduates with professional-grade criminal skills they were more than willing to exercise once they were back in the outside world.

If forced to choose between the penitentiary and the White House for four years, I would say the penitentiary, thank you.

I am in the penitentiary. The only thing that I do is my time.

Mass incarceration is the most pressing racial justice issue of our time.

I get a lot of calls from families and people who have served time and they say, 'Thank you, Sheriff. I hate the tents.' That's music to my ears.

I happen to be pretty productive when I am in jail. When you are in jail, you have to spend more time with yourself.

You should rejoice that you're in prison. Here you have time to think about your soul.

Jesus said that whatever you did to the least of his people, you did to him, and the lifers in penitentiaries are the leastest people in this country. Just look to see whose budgets are being cut these days -- the old, the crazies, the children in Head Start -- and that's where Jesus will be.

I wasn't shocked and I'm still not shocked. It's total exploitation, with everything up for grabs. Health care, gone. Destroy the environment in search of more profit. State-sponsored violence. Targeted incarceration. You know what's happening, though: The whole country is becoming a reservation.

People don't understand that you can actually lose your life going to jail. There's more violence in the jail-house than there is on the streets.

Personal lyricism is the outcry of prisoner to prisoner from the cell in solitary where each is confined for the duration of his life.

Think about how much it costs to incarcerate someone. Do we want them just sitting in prison, lifting weights, becoming violent and thinking about the next crime? Or do we want them having a little purpose in life and learning a skill?

He's never coming out except nailed in a box or in an ash can," he said. "He is not stepping out.