Quotes About Incarceration

Fifty-eight years after he was first jailed for the most heinous crimes ever committed by a juvenile, Jesse Harding Pomeroy was free at last.

In 1982 President Ronald Reagan called for a war on drugs: by 1990 more men were in federal prisons on drug charges alone than had comprised the entire 1980 federal prison population for all crimes combined.

Although victims do not always become perpetrators, a truism repeated by prosecutors at sentencing, as if it were a profound revelation never before put into words, it is the rare serious perpetrator who was not also a victim. . . . It is the rare death row inmate whose life does not read like a case study of extreme deprivation and abuse. It is the rare juvenile incarcerated in an adult prison for rape or murder who has had anything other than the cruelest of childhoods.

Throughout the USA hundreds of people, most of whom are poor and members of minorities, are languishing in jails and mental hospitals, their rights to a speedy trial, due process, and justice abandoned. These people have two things in common – they are deaf and they cannot sign or speak.

Nobody knew anyone else's private world. In the end, they were all alone as inmates on death row, side by side. Sometimes you could get a look at one another with a little pocket mirror, cell to cell, but that was all.

Until 1869, when they were banned, debtors' prisons were the great incinerators of British reputations. Those who were unable to pay their bills were jailed until their creditors were paid - an unlikely event, given that the prisoner was unable to work.

Once you've acquired a criminal record, you can be discriminated against legally in employment, housing, and access to education and public benefits. You're relegated to a permanent second-class status, forever a 'criminal.' Inflicting this amount of unnecessary pain and suffering is not cheap.

Unfortunately, prisons try very hard to make us inhuman and unreal by denying our image, and thus our existence, to the rest of the world.

I think of the prisoners on 'Orange Is the New Black,' a lot of times, as uplifting.

Very few people in prison have voices that go beyond the wall. It's my job to do the work for them because they have no one.

Exacerbating the problem of mass incarceration is that, even after someone is released from prison, the stigma of a misdemeanor or felony conviction makes finding gainful employment difficult, if not impossible.

That's what prison did for me, it isolated me, you know, it polished me up like a stone.

I stopped going to high school when I met Big Pun, which wasn't the smartest thing. So I never got my diploma. When I went to prison, it's mandatory to get your GED if you don't have a high school diploma.

It was very cold in jail. But inmates were good. They shared their stories with me.

I live in New Orleans, because it's the strangest city in the United States. It has the highest murder rate in the country, the highest incarceration rate, and often we have to boil our drinking water, but there's nowhere else remotely like it.

The majority of our criminals that we lock up are non-violent offenders.

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.

I have always had plenty of friends, and now at age sixty, I face four walls as a common prisoner.

prison of Peter and Paul

That's why you're never going to find a rich person on death row.

The only people who object to escapism are jailers.

I'm involved in the work around prison rights in general.

Prisons where people can't even work is the worst punishment you can think of. And I don't think we should put all convicts in such facilities where people are deprived of their freedom.

Science chases money, and money chases its tail, and the best minds of my generation cannot make bail.