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Quotes About Prison

I personally could never come to terms with my label of 'Criminally Insane'. Just because of my violent outbursts in prison, don't mean to say I'm mad. Obviously I had become a disruptive element within the penal system. Uncontrollable! Unpredictable! But that don't make insanity!
~ Stephen Richards
No one was expecting the six-man team of elite SAS officers to storm the prison, but that is exactly what they did do. Hurling stun grenade and tear gas canisters, they entered the jail through a skylight before freeing the terrified prison warder.
~ Stephen Richards
Prison madness is much the same! Insanity is plentiful in prisons. These days with the drug culture it's not a lot of difference, as a lot of convicts make themselves psychotic and paranoid. Many end up killers, all over petty and minor problems. Where men would once squabble, fight and kill over a ½ oz of bacca they now do the same over a gram of white powder or a bag of brown!
~ Stephen Richards
Over the next sixteen years, I would grow close to the ringleaders of the infamous Peterhead Prison Riot and hostage-taking incidents would loom large in my life.
~ Stephen Richards
What stood in one corner of the cell was disgusting: two empty disinfectant canisters and one well used and well stained piss pot, the sort of chamber pot that people would train their babies to be potty trained on before they would learn to use the toilet.
~ Stephen Richards
Once the cons were in the cell, they'd pull razors or homemade daggers out and rob the YOs of their trainers, leather jackets or jewellery. You couldn't placate them; it would be akin to expecting not to be bitten from a Rhodesian Ridgeback whilst petting it! Bar L was full of rough, colourful and out-of-control junkies who wouldn't think twice about stabbing you or slashing you just to get what you had on your feet to pay for their next hit of smack.
~ Stephen Richards
I went through a period where I couldn't keep off the establishment's roofs, it was a serious urge I had. To look at a drainpipe and start shaking with excitement, nobody knows the feeling of hitting a prison roof, not unless you've done it. Let me tell you, it's like a lotto win - it's power. You're the governor; it's a kick in the teeth to the system.
~ Stephen Richards
Like Lenny McLean said, and I agree with him totally, he told me it's these bastards that hurt the old people and fuck up the young kids, they are the animals and they hardly get any prison sentence for it.
~ Stephen Richards
Unlike most I don't fear prison, never have, never will. Obviously I don't want it, I hate it, but it's the hate that drives me on to survive.
~ Stephen Richards
I got my lawyer to visit me in the jail. He couldn't believe the bruising over my body, so he pulled the governor and asked why I was covered in marks. The governor said to my lawyer that it was 'self-inflicted' and was caused by my 'running into walls'. That part was disproved because walls don't leave footprints all over your body.
~ Stephen Richards
You might think the Bangkok Hilton (the nickname of a fictional prison in Bangkok) was tough, well that was paradise compared to this place!
~ Stephen Richards
I'll tell you, the screws' faces painted an even greater picture than my words can describe. We kept emptying our pots in the hall for two weeks before the screws started emptying our piss pots for us, but this didn't last too long after we started calling them bellhops.
~ Stephen Richards
He wondered if American jails were better than those in Russia. He
~ Steve Martini
Peace did not serve order; order served peace, and when order became godlike, sacrosanct and inviolate, then the peace thus won became a prison, and those who sought their freedom became enemies to order, and in the elimination of such enemies, peace was lost.
~ Steven Erikson
Listen, the conditions in prison as a whole - you're not sleeping in a comfortable bed, you're not eating good food, and this is for long periods of time.
~ Michael Sorrentino
There was a prison guard that introduced me to pro wrestling and I needed a hobby, so I devoted myself to it - I lived it, ate it and slept it and that's how I became MVP. So people might think MVP was an overnight success, but I had to travel a long way to get there.
~ Montel Vontavious Porter
The English prison system is altogether mediaeval and outworn. In some of its details, the system has improved since they began to send the Suffragettes to Holloway. I may say that we, by our public denunciation of the system, have forced these slight improvements.
~ Emmeline Pankhurst
Many things embarrass me, but reading isn't one of them. I'm not ashamed of my slightly weird collection of prison memoirs. Nor the flaky meditation books. After all, I can pretend I never read those.
~ Tom Rachman
There's a small group of music critics in the States who will forgive you anything - jazz, a long prison term, or what have you - anything but scoring a Hollywood musical.
~ Andre Previn
That wasn't the way that things was supposed to be. And all because the so-called culture that I thought was right, that I thought it was cool, and I thought it was fun, and it was exciting at the time. It all led to me laying in a prison bunk by myself with no one to talk to but myself.
~ Michael Vick
Is it surprising that the cellular prison, with its regular chronologies, forced labour, its authorities of surveillance and registration, its experts in normality, who continue and multiply the functions of the judge, should have become the modern instrument of penality? Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?
~ Michel Foucault
The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection much more profound than himself. A 'soul' inhabits him and brings him to existence...the soul is the effect and instrument of political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body.
~ Michel Foucault
Police surveillance provides the prison with offenders, which the prison transforms into delinquents, the targets and auxiliaries of police supervisions, which regularly send back a certain number of them to prison.
~ Michel Foucault
Freedom begins when each individual mind dares to liberate itself from the prison it created. We are free when the war in our heads is over.
~ Miguel Ruiz