Quotes About Prison

When Satan is released for a brief time at the end of the millennium, his 1000-year prison sentence has not reformed his character. He has not changed. And mankind has not changed either.

Often overlooked are the ways prison culture systematically maintains and nurtures rape culture, targeting women and men made to be women. Again, members of LGBT and trans communities suffer especially egregiously in prison,[111] since they directly challenge the heteronormativity maintained by hegemonic masculinism.

According to University of California law professor Jonathan Simon, in California, for example, political prisoner George Jackson and "Jackson's story" of emergence from poor black communities to violent resistance within prisons, "set the terms of the state's prison-expansion policy in the 1980s and provided an icon of the convict-as-revolutionary-terrorist that would reset the national common sense about prisons and prisoners.

Immigration detention centers are now a supplement to the prison archipelago in the U.S., holding as many as 400,000 (at times more than this) who are suffering conditions often criticized by Amnesty International for human rights violations.

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.

Time's agency becomes most vicious when it is routinized for the practical effect of control. The routinizaton of time is a transformation cultivated by prison authorities and designed to make every day like every other. In this experience, paradoxically, time acts even to deaden one's sense of time. All the more true is this among the 80,000, likely more,[52] who are serving time in solitary confinement. Lisa

Parenti reported in 1999 that yearly expenses of the correction industry were between $20 and $35 billion annually with "more than 523,000 full-time employees working . . . more than in any Fortune 500 company except General Motors.

More than $7 billion a year was spent in prison construction during the 1990s. By 2012 the annual cost of maintaining prisons at all levels rose to over $60 billion.

Today, the links between young black, brown, or poor people and mass incarceration are all the more startling and fearsome. We now have the documented reality of the "school-to-prison pipeline" that often gives up on excellence of education and a professional future for America's racialized poor, and then "tracks" them into jobs and communities where vulnerability enhances the likelihood of warehousing in prison.

And the further tragedy here—indeed the outrage—is that with this mode of allocating social services the overall wellbeing of those disadvantaged groups is not improved. It is usually made worse, since prison staff are rarely trained in providing more than the most basic of stop-gap measures.[32]

In the mid-1990s, New York City was spending $58,000 annually per adult inmate and $70,000 for each juvenile at Rikers.[6] In 2013, the annual cost per inmate was $167,000.[7] Over the last two decades this amounts to eight to ten times what the city spends on each child in its public schools.

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

If you want to get your outcasts out of sight, first you need a ghetto and then you need a prison to take pressure off the ghetto. . . . Short-term terror and revulsion are more powerful than long-term wisdom or self-interest.

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

The skeptic often retorts that the "criminally-minded" regularly refuse to admit their own wrongdoing and responsibility. But this is a callous and self-justifying skepticism that overlooks just how easy it is to fall down the road to prison as a result of others' unfair practices, vicious action, or because of the vicissitudes of navigating corporate-driven dispossession, poverty, and racism.

Convention center hotels play host to "Prison Expo" conventions. Since the mid-1990s these conventions feature upwards of 600 booths, touting "the latest in prison innovation and technology to more than 5,000 conventioneers.

As French novelist and essayist Jean Genet once wrote about prison, "it is in this place that racism reaches its cruelest pitch . . . in this place that racism becomes a kind of concentrate of racism.

Second, carceral terror, by implanting fear in the incarcerated, often returns persons broken by fear into their communities. I stressed in the first edition of this book that systems of punitive terror create through brutal prison culture a certain number of predators that often return to the streets, increasing the vulnerabilities of poor neighborhoods.

Communities suffering a disproportionate number of returnees from prison are not just filled with predators and "super predators." This supposition can become another mantra of white caricature of communities of color, and often is used to justify more systemic surveillance and police violence in those neighborhoods. It is more important to recall that even if some return as violent actors, just as many, or more, return as fearful and broken persons into those communities.

Baldwin makes it clear that the man released back onto the streets is "afraid, in fact, to hit those streets," and "to be free to confront his life." He is left by prison "terrified . . . of what life may bring, is terrified of freedom; and is struggling in a trap.

There is also the problem that, in the wider society "outside," rape in prison has been sensationalized, even fetishized in some quarters. This functions as another way to demonize the prison population, to render it sexually other, a cauldron of "the beastly," the "deviant." Again

In these ways, the racial distribution of groups in the prison population becomes a dramatic stage on which the rest of society works out, in various modes, its calculus of white supremacy. The racism within the prisons provides a platform by which the larger society continually sharpens up its racial calculus.

The Research Council concluded, "Most studies estimate the crime-reducing effect of incarceration to be small and some report that the size of the effect diminishes with the scale of incarceration." The study emphasizes as a major point that the crime rate is not what influences the incarceration rate. Instead, "the incarceration rate is the outcome of policies affecting who goes to prison and for how long and of policies affecting parole revocation.

Many church groups have their "prison ministries" and Christians participate in numerous education and assistance programs to the incarcerated. But do they challenge the carceral state? This is the broader and deeper problematic the churches must confront. Numerous