Quotes About Inmates

The other inmates stand in a long straight line, flanked by guards, and I am dragged past them. I do not respect them, because they will not run - will not try to escape.

There is a wonderful metaphor of the unconscious in Peter Gay's excellent biography of Freud, Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York: Norton, 1988), p. 128: "Rather, the unconscious proper resembles a maximum-security prison holding anti-social inmates languishing for years or recently arrived, inmates harshly treated and heavily guarded, but barely kept under control and forever attempting to escape" (italics added).

Prisons are fascinating places, especially when the inmates are educated white-collar types.

When I was in jail, I was a lot of people's favorite person. I practically ran the jail. I had more freedom than the police.

Administrators at Rikers Island claim today that their large prison colony is a "huge employment opportunity" for the South Bronx. While caging some 14,000 inmates across some 14 different jail units, Rikers employs 11,500 people as correctional officers or civilian staff.

fact, there is a strong element of intentionality here on the part of leaders in forming prison policy. At high levels of planning officials have even advocated procedures for breaking down inmates, making them especially vulnerable to the routinizing of time. They

They explicitly have proposed "brainwashing processes," isolation of inmates from family by locating them at great distance from their communities, aiming "to break or seriously weaken close emotional ties," withholding mail, and more. Such

After ten days in solitary confinement, many prisoners display clear signs of mental harm, and one study showed that about a third will eventually develop active psychosis. There are at least eighty thousand such inmates in America. The United Nations has determined that holding a person in isolation for more than fifteen days is cruel and inhuman punishment.

As I listened to the inmates' schemes to reenter the world, I did not miss the irony that we were being released while the innocent remained behind. We were the scourge on society. We were the "lepers," And we were about to be set free.

The SS experimented briefly in 1944 with using Hollerith cards and tabulators to steer the deployment of camp inmates to work sites but soon gave up on the idea.