Quotes About Incarceration

If you look at it that way, then you start thinking about the basic things, which are jobs not jails, and education not incarceration.

Prison is a Socialist paradise where equality prevails, everything is supplied, and competition is eliminated.

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

I'll tell ya one thing -- the jail house is jus' a kind a way a drivin' a guy slowly nuts. See? An' they go nuts, an' you see 'em an' hear 'em, an' pretty soon you don' know if you're nuts or not. When they get to screamin' in the night sometimes you think it's you doin' the screamin'--an' sometimes it is.

I mean, what is prison, really, except a good bar without the liquor?

So what really works? Treatments in jail do some good, but it's mostly too late: finding a family and a job or just growing older make most prisoners eventually give up crime.

I met my fathers in prison, they too a part of a scene; digging death.

Children of those who have been incarcerated are five times more likely to go to prison than children of parents who have never been incarcerated. The sins of the father visiting the child.

It is tragic that people who are incarcerated are unable to vote. They are probably the most important voices to listen to because they can tell us what we need to change.

The U.S. penal system has a strong tendency to "level down". The much-heralded "liberal" features of American political culture ironically have helped to render the U.S. penal system harsher, more degrading, and less forgiving as it extends a brute egalitarianism across the board.

On the wagon sped, and I, as well as my comrades, gave a despairing farewell glance at freedom as we came in sight of the long stone buildings.

The securest place is a prison cell, but there is no liberty

My continued incarceration has served some good purposes. My defense committee has served as a training ground for other organizers in their defense of freedom and justice.

It is only after slavery and prison that the sweetest appreciation of freedom can come.

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

My occupation now, I suppose, is jail inmate.

While there is a lower class I am in it; while there is a criminal element I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free

Michel Foucault reminds us that in societies that organize massively to incarcerate its citizens "there is no outside" for anyone.

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

More than $7 billion a year was spent in prison construction during the 1990s. By 2012 the annual cost of maintaining prisons at all levels rose to over $60 billion.

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.

Today, the links between young black, brown, or poor people and mass incarceration are all the more startling and fearsome. We now have the documented reality of the "school-to-prison pipeline" that often gives up on excellence of education and a professional future for America's racialized poor, and then "tracks" them into jobs and communities where vulnerability enhances the likelihood of warehousing in prison.

In the mid-1990s, New York City was spending $58,000 annually per adult inmate and $70,000 for each juvenile at Rikers.[6] In 2013, the annual cost per inmate was $167,000.[7] Over the last two decades this amounts to eight to ten times what the city spends on each child in its public schools.

Increasingly, U.S. private prisons construct and manage the poor in carceral institutions, for profit. But corporations also offer privatized services to local, state, and federal governments for their carceral facilities. Private