Quotes About Prisons

The Bureaus of Prisons in states across America know this well; many of them project the number of prison beds they will need in the future based on third- or fourth-grade reading statistics.

Jails and prisons are unique medical ecosystems. Many of the people who end up there are already in shaky health from drug use, marginal living conditions, or poverty. Plus, the conditions inside jails and prisons—crowded, with little access to health care—exacerbate the spread of infection.

Our mind might make prisons, but it also gives us keys.

Empty your birdcage, empty your aquarium! To love is to give freedom; to love is to refuse the prisons!

American prisons have been outsourced. Much of education is outsourced. Much of the law is outsourced. Most of health is outsourced. Why not outsource Government?! Well, that's our little joke, of course – it has already been outsourced. Corporations, the super rich, Wall Street and lobbyists run the Government. Elections are just a PR exercise to fool the sheeple that they have some sort of say in who governs them. They don't.

Mindless punishment and super-incarceration have been societal disasters: locking away tens of thousands of young people in hyper-violent prisons, dominated by institutionalized race wars, without any semblance of education, rehabilitation or hope. The real function of the prison system, indeed, is not to safeguard communities, but to warehouse hatred for the day when it returns to the street.

Yet very likely, if they've strayed too far from truth, this lifetime will not nearly be long enough for them to find balance and clarity. They won't be safe, either for themselves or for others who similarly believe the world is an evil place. They'll need rehabilitation, ideally in a nurturing, supportive environment, yet if society believes this is out of reach, emotionally or financially, prisons and institutions will have to suffice.

Eventually, there will not be enough prisons if there are not enough good homes.

As parenting declines, the need for policing increases. There will always be a shortage of police if there is a shortage of effective parents! Likewise, there will not be enough prisons if there are not enough good homes.

Give parents the tools to nurture their child in infancy and the result will be a more self-confident and resilient individual for decades to come. It's far less expensive to coach parents to support children than to maintain prisons years later.

One of the most infuriating elements of American myopia about investing in at-risk kids is that politicians often insist that they don't have the funds to pay for social services--but they somehow find the resources to pay for prisons later on.

As a fraction of GDP, the United States spends on job-training and assistance programs barely one-fifth as much as the average among industrialized countries. Moreover, the United States has significantly cut spending on these programs in recent decades, while significantly increasing spending on prisons instead.

En este siglo toda empresa colectiva edifica prisiones. Sólo el egoísmo nos impide colaborar en vilezas. Hoy los copartícipes terminan en cómplices.

If you ask most people today where the mentally ill are in our society, they will tell you they're in state mental hospitals. They're wrong. . . . They are in our jails and prisons. —Judge Steven Leifman Eleventh Judicial Circuit Miami, Florida

Songs are funny things. They can slip across borders. Proliferate in prisons. Penetrate hard shells. I always believed that the right song at the right moment could change history.

There is particularly bitter irony for the modern reader in Damian's citation of traditional laws that rigorously punish child sex abusers, sending them to monastic prisons for the rest of their lives for a single offense. In the Book of Gomorrah we hear the voice of a prophet speaking to us over the span of centuries, reminding us of vital truths we have abandoned, and calling us to repentance.

In the same decades that saw the rise of mass incarceration, the number of beds available in state mental hospitals across the country dropped from 339 beds per 100,000 people in 1955 to under 20 beds per 100,000 people by 2015. There are now ten times as many mentally ill people in our prisons and jails as there are in state mental institutions.