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Prisons Quotes

Browse 36 quotes about Prisons.

Prisons Quotes

“But even if I know what governs their trajectory, if I know the rules of the movement of things and how things are organized and how certain mutations, transformations, gestations take place, even if I know all that, I shall only have learnt how to get along after a fashion in the enormous gaol, the oppressive prison in which I am held. What a farce, what a snare, what a booby-trap. We were born cheated. For if we are not to know, if there is nothing to know, why do we have this longing to know?”

ScienceKnowingHuman ConditionFutilityPrisons
Book:Fragments of a Journal
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“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?”

SchoolDisciplineAuthorityPrisonHospitalsSurveillanceSchoolsPrisonsBarracks
Author:Michel Foucault
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“We have glorified wealth and freedom so much that it is impossible for most of us to truly believe that a man can truly be happy in a shack or within the confines of a prison cell.”

BelieveHumorFunnyHappinessSpiritualJoySpiritualityWealthFreedomMoneyRichHumourWorshipGloryJokesHumorousSlaveryPrisonSlaveRichesHappyLiberationSatireMaterialismWealthyJailPrisonerIdolsAphorismConsumerismFreeJokeHilariousJoyousAphorismsIdolatryExaggerationGlorifyContentSlavesAphoristAphoristsShackMaterialPrisonersLiberateJailerPrisonsIdolPrison CellsConfineExaggerateConfinesJailsInflatedInflatePrison CellJailersJailedShacks
Author:Mokokoma Mokhonoana
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“When I first went to death row in December 1983, America was in the early stages of a radical transformation that would turn us into an unprecedentedly harsh and punitive nation and result in mass imprisonment that has no historical parallel. Today we have the highest rate of incarceration in the world. The prison population has increased from 300,000 people in the early 1970s to 2.3 million people today. There are nearly six million people on probation or on parole. One in every fifteen people born in the United States in 2001 is expected to go to jail or prison; one in every three black male babies born in this century is expected to be incarcerated.”

AmericaCapital PunishmentIncarcerationDeath RowPrisonsPunitive Measures
Book:Just Mercy
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“Let us once again be clear: if we oppose violence, then we must oppose all forms of policing. If we oppose violence, then we must call for an end to war, an end to occupation. We must oppose sexual assault, and prisons as institutions that wield it as a strategic tool. If we abhor violence to bodies, families, and communities, then we should abhor all these systems and call for their immediate abolition. As Ta-Nehisi Coates said so perfectly in his Atlantic piece "Nonviolence as Compliance," "When nonviolence is preached by the representatives of the state, while the state doles out heaps of violence to its citizens, it reveals itself to be a con." In Support of Baltimore; or, Smashing Police Cars Is Logical Political Strategy”

ViolenceSexual AssaultBaltimoreAnti RacismPolicingPrisonsTaking Sides
Author:Benji Hart
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“A society with a great number of prisons is a totally failed society because it has terribly failed to create a marvellous society where crime is not something widespread but an exception!”

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Author:Mehmet Murat Ildan
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“Bringing this all together, the 1980s become and intensely significant point for the purposes of our understanding of what one could consider the degradation of our prison system and our food system in America: We see at that time period a sharp increase in the rates of diet-related disease, the number of incarcerated people, and the gap between the wealthy and the poor.”

Food HistoryPrisonersPrisonsFood Service
Book:Prison Food in America
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“There are three methods of dealing with offenders against society once they are apprehended: retribution, deterrence, and rehabilitation. Prison officials and men generally lay claim more or less to advocating all three. At present the public thinks that offenders should be punished. There are many different reasons why this is so, among them the belief that the average criminal responds to nothing but fear and penalties. Yet there is some real evidence that only through the very opposite of fear and punishment--intelligent good will--can men be reached and challenged and changes brought about.”

PunishmentRehabilitationPrisonersPrisonsJails
Book:Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin
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“When a loved one is incarcerated, it's like an atom bomb falls on them, obliterating everything in an instant. Their freedom, their movement, their livelihood, gone. But the bomb's shock waves spread out and envelop close family and friends too. The prison industrial complex eats incarcerated people as the main course but also feasts on their relatives, relationships, and communities. Its appetite is voracious.”

RelationshipsFamiliesIncarcerationPrisonersPrisonsPrison Industrial ComplexJails
Book:Go Back to Where You Came From: And Other Helpful Recommendations on How to Become American
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“And so, it seems to me, it is with our prisons. They are filled with criminals which our virtuous State has made what they are by its iniquitous laws, its grinding monopolies, and the horrible social conditions that result from them. We enact many laws that manufacture criminals, and then a few that punish them. Is it too much to expect that the new social conditions which must follow the abolition of all interference with the production and distribution of wealth will in the end so change the habits and propensities of men that our jails and prisons, our policemen and our soldiers,—in a word, our whole machinery and outfit of defence,—will be superfluous? That, at least, is the Anarchists' belief. It sounds Utopian, but it really rests on severely economic grounds.”

CrimePunishmentUtopianAbolitionPrisons
Book:The Individualist Anarchists: Anthology of Liberty, 1881-1908
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“Angola prison has been regularly and casually referred to as a plantation by state authorities and media for over a century. When many people say "Angola is a prison built on a former plantation," it is often made as an unsettling observation, not as a moral indictment. Is it because our collective understanding of slavery, and its inherent violence, is so limited? Or is it that violence experienced by Black people is thought less worthy of mourning? White supremacy enacts violence against Black people, but also numbs a whole country--Black and white--to what would in any other context provoke our moral indignation.”

RacismSlaveryAfrican AmericansBlacksWhite SupremacyPlantationsPrisonsAngola Prison
Book:How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America
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“States do not grapple with decarceration strategies & explore alternatives bc of an ethical recognition of the continuing harms of prisons or an understanding of the intertwined histories of capitalism, white supremacy, & punishment in the US, but rather bc coffers are empty, and prisons & punishment consume ever-growing portions of shrinking revenues.”

Mass IncarcerationPrisonsCriminal Justice ReformPrison ReformDecarceration
Book:For the Children?: Protecting Innocence in a Carceral State
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“Person-situation fit: There is considerable evidence to support the idea that people prefer situations that 'fit' with their dominant personality characteristics. Extroverts tend to like busy environments, whereas introverts prefer less stimulating places. When a person gets stuck in an antithetical environment for a long period of time (like a prison or university), his or her personality will tend to change over time to better fit the situation.”

IntrovertsExtrovertsMass IncarcerationPrisonsPersonality ChangeEnvironmental Influence
Book:The Five Percent: Finding Solutions to Seemingly Impossible Conflicts
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“Barlinnie Prison stands on dark and bloody ground. It is a temple of lost souls, and a place of living nightmares. It’s been the breaker of many a man’s dreams for more than a century. This prison works to a model of penitence with no pretence of rehabilitation. The criminal population that society has forsaken has filled this once, seemingly, bottomless pit to overflowing with their despair and nightmares of pain. More specifically, it is the battleground of an undeclared war that still ravages to this day, between the screws and the cons. The screws, backed by their authority, would use violence, but in return the prisoners would have to resort to their cunning, beguile, and the odd sudden act of violence.”

Jimmy HollandScottish Penal SystemPrisonsPrison ViolenceBarlinnie Prison
Book:Lost in Care: The True Story of a Forgotten Child
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