Quotes About Prisons

But rituals are important to the men who run prisons, and nothing gets their adrenaline pumping like an execution. Their little lives are mundane and monotonous, but occasionally the world tunes in when it's time to kill a killer. No effort at heightened drama is to be missed.

Unintended victims of tough laws passed by tough politicians over the past forty years. One million young black men now warehoused in decaying prisons, idling away the days at taxpayer expense. Our prisons are packed. Our streets are filled with drugs. Who's winning the war? We've lost our minds.

One million young black men now warehoused in decaying prisons, idling away the days at taxpayer expense. Our prisons are packed. Our streets

Le coeur a ses prisons que l'intelligence n'ouvre pas. [in De la grandeur]

The regime had understood that one person leaving her house while asking herself: Are my trousers long enough? Is my veil in place? Can my make-up be seen? Are they going to whip me? No longer asks herself: Where is my freedom of thought? Where is my freedom of speech? My life, is it liveable? What's going on in the political prisons?

Recall that the recently resurgent, militarized U.S. police forces have grown up at the same time as the spectacular rise of the U.S. prison industry. Indeed, the buildup of the U.S. prison archipelago, with its unprecedented rate of construction is itself a kind of spectacle, a grand SWAT operation worked upon our social landscape. Both the rise of prisons and the rising up of militarized policing make a show of spectacular force in the nation today.

Let me emphasize, as well, that given a society pervaded by white racism, as discussed in the previous chapter, it will be the mentally ill of color who are generally taken to be a "criminal element" (instead of having a mental impairment), and so simply swept into the prisons by the states' carceral dragnet operations.

The shift of the mentally ill into prisons, from previous treatment in psychiatric institutions (already inadequate in many ways) is just one example of this social care through penal confinement at work in the U.S.A. today.

Private prisons are an offspring of the larger incarceration binge we have been tracing. The private prisons mark the spaces in U.S. society where the bodies of the poor most dramatically show the results of the policies comprehensively inaugurated by the Ronald Reagan presidency, which sought to privatize in the early 1980s as many government functions as possible. The

One key problem with private prisons is that private prison profiteers are harder to hold accountable for human rights violations and inhumane conditions.

Investigative journalist Chris Hedges citing ACLU statistics notes that between 1970 and 2015 U.S. prisons have mushroomed by 700 percent.

Moreover, in private prisons people of color are even more overrepresented than they are in federal and state prison populations. This is because private prisons contract to avoid housing the more costly elderly prisoner. They prefer the younger bodies, and so they hold more of the youth of color, the bulk of these coming in as targets of the recent "war on drugs.

The "most shocking of all contracts," write Selman and Leighton, was a Federal Bureau of Prisons award to CCA in the amount of $129 million "to house twelve hundred criminal-alien prisoners at its facility in Youngstown, Ohio."[38] The "criminal-alien," here, is actually the immigrant. Private

Private prisons have a special interest in tapping the burgeoning immigrant groups to fill beds and cells, especially in the post-9/11 period of the so-called "war on terror." The

As UCLA historian Sarah Haley notes, in earlier periods when the numbers of the confined were "only" in the tens of thousands, the prisons still concentrated, "massified," the lives of targeted groups, particularly African Americans in post-slavery U.S.A.

Politicians who justify the lockdown craze often argue that we are ridding our streets and neighborhoods of violent offenders and feared super predators. Policy-makers thus play again on the public's "common sense" assumption that prisons "keep the innocent safe from the guilty.

For those critics who think somehow that prisons are "coddling" prisoners, that they have it too easy, I suggest such critics spend some time reading the court cases investigating prison conditions, showing the deprivations of even the most basic requirements of mental and physical health. These cases are now too numerous and the practices of degradation too entrenched to ignore.

In other words, individual white citizens today, even anti-racist ones, can be very much against racism, even conquering visible marks of prejudice in their personal lives, and still tolerate prisons as the racist structural formation they exhibit in society with its long history of white supremacist social formation. Whatever

The appropriate response to precarious people's lives is not more prisons, but the forming of just policies for all and creative socialism in the practice of building new institutions for care and restoration. Attaining those, however, will require building people's movements that take down Lockdown America and free up new imagination and practice for dramatic and feasible socialist futures.

To understand prisons as racially structured, consider, first, how the racialized make-up of the prison population is usually described. Writers often deploy a kind of shorthand here, stating the prisons are made up of over 60 percent or more prisoners of color.[80] At one point that figure was as high as 70 percent for "'minorities,"' or 'people of color'.

The problems I write of in this section do not focus on only violent practices inside correctional facilities, detention centers, or federal, state, and local prisons and jails. Just as importantly, these internal dynamics are significant because they express and reinforce sexual inequality and gender injustice in the larger society.

The prisons of today preserve and display the way the black-white antithesis has been deployed in white supremacist logic and persists as a dominant structure. That is to say, in today's prisons an "anti-black white racism" constitutes a white supremacist order of power deployed against all non-white groups. In

There is, first of all, the way prisons transform the human experience of time. The prison should be seen as a kind of theater in which time is forged into an instrument of torture, producing sustained bouts of fear and panic that make prisons also a weapon of terror. The

Custodial sentences were not the penalties of choice in the ancient world, prisons being little more than places where criminals were held before execution. Fines, exile and death made up the usual repertoire of Roman punishment.