Quotes About Prison

San Pedro prison, apart from being a social microcosm, is also a microeconomy that operates under basic capitalist principles. In fact, it's probably more efficient than the whole Bolivian national economy. And more democratic, too, but I'll explain the prison election system to you another day.

Eritrea, on the east coast of Africa, near Ethiopia, had been used by the British during the war to imprison members of the Irgun. They had called it Devil's Island.

I think that an objective reader may see how in the society to which I was exposed as a black youth here in America, for me to wind up in a prison was really just about inevitable. It happens to so many thousands of black youth.

I knew right there in prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life. As I see it today, the ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.

In the hectic pace of the world today, there is no time for meditation, or for deep thought. A prisoner has time that he can put to good use. I'd put prison second to college as the best place for a man to go if he needs to do some thinking. If he's motivated, in prison he can change his life.

I don't think anybody ever got more out of going to prison than I did.

I knew right there in prison that reading had forever changed the course of my life.

They used as a reason for my transfer [from one prison to another] that I refused to take some kind of shots, an innoculation or something.

I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading opened to me. I knew right there in prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life. As I see it today, the ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive. I

I had sunk to the very bottom of the American white man's society when—soon now, in prison—I found Allah and the religion of Islam and it completely transformed my life.

The content has both form and substance: for example, the form is prison and the substance is those that are locked up, the prisoners . . . The expression also has a form and a substance: for example, the form is penal law and the substance is 'delinquency' in so far as it is the object of statements.

I am alive, I live, I breathe, I put my hand out, unfolded, into the sunlight. Where I am is not a prison but a privilege...

I am alive, I live, I breathe, I put my hand out, unfolded, into the sunlight. Where I am is not a prison but a privilege, who was in love with either/or.

I did not realize the dreadful facts of life. I did not know that a pattern forms before we are aware of it, and that what we think we make becomes a rigid prison making us.

I don't think there's been a time in American history with more innocent people in prison.

I'm in prison. But my heart and mind is free. Gangsta haters on the streets are doing more time than me. They need 30 police escorts with them every time they walk down the street.

Mass incarceration is the most pressing racial justice issue of our time.

I get a lot of calls from families and people who have served time and they say, 'Thank you, Sheriff. I hate the tents.' That's music to my ears.

I had a lot of time and the first year I was in prison, I tried to get the party to stop the shooting, to stop the talk about the gun thing.

It's natural for humans to suppress urges, for when our desires are left unchecked they lead to broken relationships, prison time, and forest fires.

My time in prison only deepened my resolve against apartheid. Even while I was in prison, I fought against it, teaching my cellmates about white supremacy and how to fight against it.

I'm a patient man, Ebie. I had to learn that in prison. But I learned other things, too. That there is so much trouble in this world, we need to do everything we can, every day of our lives, to stop trouble from happening. Not cause it.

San Quentin's is the safest beach in the world. We're not talking about lifeguards here who might yell at someone who's being rude-we're talking about armed guards, in watchtowers, two blocks away.

What should I say about reading? I consider a room without reading to be a hell without consolation, a gibbet without relief, a prison without light, a tomb without a vent … . —Peter of Celle, On Affliction and Reading 8—13 PL 202