Quotes About Prisons

I'm an artist and a journalist. I travel around the world very often for 'Vice Magazine,' and I draw and I write about prisons, about conflict zones.

I travel all over the United States basically in evangelism, speaking in churches, speaking in prisons, speaking in rehab centers wherever I can basically sharing my story of redemption and the turnaround in my life.

We need to have more second chance programs. I'm glad that we're ending private prisons in the federal system; I want to see them ended in the state system.

Already this war on gangs in California is taking money from universities to build prisons, and the universities have some clout.

Being incarcerated does not mean being devoid of the capacity to learn, grow, and think, and it's critical that prisons provide spaces where learning can be both cultivated and encouraged.

I'm starting to think you like prisons, " "And that you have the worst taste in men.

Prisons are prototypes for the future, an example of the disempowerment and exploitation corporations seek to inflict on all workers.

The term 'deinstitutionalization' conceals some simple truths, namely, that old, unwanted persons, formerly housed in state hospitals, are now housed in nursing homes; that young, unwanted persons, formerly also housed in state hospitals, are now housed in prisons or parapsychiatric facilities; and that both groups of inmates are systematically drugged with psychiatric medications.

Make no mistake, the privatization of prisons is less about unburdening taxpayers than it is about providing bankrupt communities with sources of income and especially about providing corporations with a captured population available for unpaid labor.

Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.

Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.

It is not the prisoners who need reformation, it is the prisons.

It's too bad war makes peopledisappear like chess pieces, and that prisonsturn prisoners into movie endings.

Mental ghettos are not mirages; they actually exist in palpable reality: being "open" inside one's mental or intellectual ghetto does not open its door but simply allows one to harbour the illusion that there is no ghetto and no door. The most dangerous prisons are those with invisible bars.

Have not prisons - which kill all will and force of character in man, which enclose within their walls more vices than are met with on any other spot of the globe - always been universities of crime?

Fyodor Dostoyevsky said that the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.

In 1982 I reported and wrote a Time cover story called "Inmate Nation" about what's now called mass incarceration, because the number of U.S. inmates had just started to increase sharply and, to my editor and me, alarmingly—that year by 43,000 to 412,000. The total number of inmates today is 1.5 million, of whom 130,000 are in privately run prisons.

Mrs. Greene made me understand the parallels between race and caste--- and how women's bodies were used to perpetuate both. Different prisons. Same key.

living in India had made me aware of how segregated my own country was. But only Mrs. Greene made me understand the parallels between race and caste—and how women's bodies were used to perpetuate both. Different prisons. Same key.

I am reminded of Bryan Stevenson's four steps for creating change, in the secret world of prisons or otherwise: There is power in proximity. Get close to the problem you feel drawn to. Change the narrative. Stay hopeful. Be willing to do uncomfortable things. Secrets have power only as long as they are secret.

For instance, Americans are supposed to cherish freedom, yet we imprison a bigger percentage of our people than any other country in the world. I talk to students who are graduating in crippling debt, yet don't connect this to state legislatures that are building prisons we don't need instead of schools we do need, and then spending an average of fifty thousand dollars a year per prisoner and way less per student.

It is certain that the study of human psychology, if it were undertaken exclusively in prisons, would also lead to misrepresentation and absurd generalizations.

She sensed that what her aunt spoke of as love was something else—a bribe, a threat, an indecent will to power. She knew that the kind of imprisonment that love might impose was also, mysteriously, a freedom for the soul and spirit, was water in the dry place, and had nothing to do with the prisons, churches, laws, rewards, and punishments, that so positively cluttered the landscape of her aunt's mind.

I don't feel uncomfortable in forbidding institutions, and work with, say, prisons or psychiatric institutions could be one of the things that evolve out of the Laureateship.