Quotes About Prison

James James Jameson – his real name – who had escaped state prison

If I owe a person money, and cannot pay him, and he threatens to put me in prison, another person can take the debt upon himself, and pay it for me. But if I have committed a crime, every circumstance of the case is changed. Moral justice cannot take the innocent for the guilty even if the innocent would offer itself. To suppose justice to do this, is to destroy the principle of its existence, which is the thing itself. It is then no longer justice. It is indiscriminate revenge.

This was what the old gangster in the California prison had been trying to describe to Elizabeth Waring. The tape-recorder team in New York had managed to stumble on a man who had never done anything for a living except kill people. He had been doing it for, say, twenty years, and he had gotten pretty good at it.

Which of us has known his brother? Which of us has looked into his father's heart? Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent? Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?

Women now have choices. They can be married, not married, have a job, not have a job, be married with children, unmarried with children. Men have the same choice we've always had: work or prison.

The whole family is a bunch of dangerous freaks...Most are ex-cons or junkies or deranged from inbreeding. Five have died violently, three are back in prison, two have gone insane from untreated venereal disease, and one writes book reviews.

Fear, like self-pity, is a prison of its own making.

Jail ain't for nobody.

I was put in the Anda cell at the Arthur Road jail which is the most secluded cell. You have no contact with anyone and you don't even get newspapers. I was completely numb.

My mom was a nurse at Rikers Island and she cried to me about not going the wrong route.

Then the Warden said, "Do you have anything you'd like to say?" and Gary looked up at the ceiling and hesitated, then said, "Let's do it." That was it. The most pronounced amount of courage, Vern decided, he'd ever seen, no quaver, no throatiness, right down the line.

You could easily do away with a lot of jails. They're shit. They breed, they don't deter, crime.

Meanwhile, a turkey dinner with all the trimmings was the highlight of Christmas Day at Utah State Prison where Gilmore is in isolation for disciplinary reasons.

I heard my blood, singing in its prison, and the sea sang with a murmur of light, one by one the walls gave way, all of the doors were broken down, and the sun came bursting through my forehead, it tore apart my closed lids, cut loose my being from its wrappers, and pulled me out of myself to wake me from this animal sleep and its centuries of stone

Grief is the stuff of life. A life without grief is no life at all. But regret is a prison. Some part of you which you deeply value lies forever impaled at a crossroads you can no longer find and never forget.

A life without grief is no life at all. But regret is a prison. Some part of you which you deeply value lies forever impaled at a crossroads you can no longer find and never forget

I'll go slower. Grief is the stuff of life. A life without grief is no life at all. But regret is a prison. Some part of you which you deeply value lies forever impaled at a crossroads you can no longer find and never forget.

Today I live on an island, in a house that is sad, hard, severe, that I built for myself, solitary on a sheer rock over the sea: a house that is the spectre, the secret image of prison. The image of my nostalgia. Maybe I never desired, not even then, to escape from jail. Man is not meant to live freely in freedom, but to be free inside a prison.

the black folks say that only colored boys are sent to jail, and they not because they are guilty, but because the State needs criminals to eke out its income by their forced labor. Immigrants

My own conviction is that semiotics provides an escape from the solipsist prison by its stress on the social origins of language--you have to point to an apple and name it for me before I know there is such a thing--and the existence of a world of apples outside ourselves.

The blind sleep, and the deaf and dumb sleep, The prisoner sleeps well in the prison, the runaway son sleeps, The murderer that is to be hung next day, how does he sleep? And the murder'd person, how does he sleep?

CUT TO: ERNIE, another prisoner, sitting on john, pants down.

Three-quarters of dads who were in South Carolina jails for being behind in child support payments suffer from extreme poverty. And one-eighth of all South Carolina inmates are in jail for being behind in child support payments. No dad is imprisoned for not spending enough time with his children. And it is rare for a mom to go to jail for preventing dad from spending enough time with his children.

Since that moment, I'd bought into the idea that isolation would ease my pain and indifference was the remedy for rejection. Clarity was quick in coming. Isolation is a prison and indifference is a lie. Neither work.