Quotes About Incarceration

They're not supposed to show prison films in prison. Especially ones that are about escaping.

Once labeled a felon, you are ushered into a parallel social universe. You can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education and public benefits - forms of discrimination that we supposedly left behind.

All the old forms of discrimination, the forms of discrimination we supposedly left behind, are now perfectly legal once you've been labeled a felon.

Many of the old forms of discrimination that we supposedly left behind during the Jim Crow era are suddenly legal again, once you've been branded a felon.

Prison is essentially a shortage of space made up for by a surplus of time; to an inmate, both are palpable.

You like it in jail? It's not too bad. You don't meet the best people, but who the hell wants to?

You like it in jail? It's not too bad. You don't meet the best people, but who the hell wants to?

They can keep men in here, under lock and key, deep in the dungeon until the final moments of their lives, so that men like York and me will never taste the rain. But they cannot keep us from passing our condensation on to the sky. They cannot keep us from raining down in China.

Alan Lomax recordings of the prisoners singing

My brother and sister have led extraordinary lives, but I wasn't there, and I can't tell you that part. I've stuck here to the part I can tell, the part that's mine, and still everything I've said is all about them, a chalk outline around the space where they should have been. Three children, one story. The only reason I'm the one telling it is that I'm the one not currently in a cage.

Eighty percent of custodial suicides are achieved by hanging. Prison inmates are seven times more likely to kill themselves than the general population.

At any given time in the U.S. penal system, at least half the inmate population have been diagnosed with some kind of mental illness.

A man in a jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company

I realized then that a man who had lived only one day could easily live for a hundred years in prison. He would have enough memories to keep him from being bored

In zoos, along with the animals, the humanity of man is also prisoned! No cage is humane!

I am not a prisoner of my sexuality like men younger than myself although I write about being a prisoner.

Nearly a quarter of American men were in the Armed forces. The rest were in school, in prison, or were George W. Bush.

Finn smiled ruefully. "I'm a Prisoner, old man. Just like you.

When a person goes to a country and finds their newspapers filled with nothing but good news, he can bet there are good men in jail.

Men in prison are "civilly dead" and have no claim to any say in policy.

Too many young African-American and Latino men ended up in jail for nonviolent offenses.

I had gone to jail, but I wasn't gettin' locked up for drugs then. I was gettin' locked up for guns. My moms kept finding guns and stuff in my room and she was gettin' more scared.

It costs a hell of a lot more money to put somebody in jail than send them to the University of Virginia.

No one should be incarcerated for debt or squeezed for money they have no chance of getting their hands on.