Quotes & Sayings About Prison Inmates

He thought of all the quaint Victorian houses in Wayward Pines and of all the families who lived inside them. How many residents - inmates - kept up a strong, carefree countenance during the day, but then lay awake at night, sleepless, minds racing, terrified and struggling to comprehend why they'd been locked away in this scenic prison? He imagined more than a few. But human beings were, if nothing else, adaptable. — Blake Crouch

I wouldn't be satisfied simply escaping from my prison of silence; I was planning to escape, free the other inmates, shoot the warden, and burn down the prison. Sometimes I get that way. It's a surprisingly useful frame of mind. — Scott Adams

The United States now has more prison inmates than full-time farmers. — Eric Schlosser

A prison does not only lock its inmates inside, it keeps all others out. Her strongest prison is of her own construction. — Margaret Atwood

We're not exactly heavenly angels. More like prison inmates with wings. — Keri Lake

In California, there was Atascadero State Hospital, constructed in 1954 at the cost to taxpayers of over $10 million (almost $110 million in today's money). Atascadero was a maximum-security psychiatric prison on the central coast where mentally disordered male lawbreakers [including homosexuals] from all over California were incarcerated. Inmates were treated at Atascadero by a variety of methods, including electroconvulsive therapy; lobotomy; sterilization, and hormone injections. Anectine was used often for 'behavior modification.' It was a muscle relaxant, which gave the person to whom it was administered the sensation of choking or drowning, while he received the message from the doctor that if he didn't change his behavior he would die (10). — Lillian Faderman

Everyone who has ever been to school knows that school is prison, but almost nobody beyond school age says it is. It's not polite. We all tiptoe around the truth because admitting it would make us seem cruel and would point a finger at well-intentioned people doing what they believe to be essential. . . . A prison, according to the common, general definition, is any place of involuntary confinement and restriction of liberty. In school, as in adult prisons, the inmates are told exactly what they must do and are punished for failure to comply. Actually, students in school must spend more time doing exactly what they are told than is true of adults in penal institutions. Another difference, of course, is that we put adults in prison because they have committed a crime, while we put children in school because of their age. — Peter Gray

The greater ignorance towards a country is not ignoring what its politicians have to say, it is ignoring what the inmates in its prisons have to say. — Criss Jami

Today, over 50 percent of prison and jail inmates in the United States have a diagnosed mental illness, a rate nearly five times greater than that of the general adult population. — Bryan Stevenson

I went to Rikers one time to do 'Third Watch,' and I remember thinking, 'Wow, this is a scary place.' We were using a section of the prison where half of it was still populated by inmates. — Selenis Leyva

Murderers - serving life sentences - were caring for their dying fellow inmates. Washing their bed-sore covered bodies, changing their diapers, holding their hands while they took their last breath. It was the other side of death, not the one at the end of a sudden muzzle flash, but the slow and wrenching kind, leaving plenty of time for hard reflection. — Lisa R. Cohen

I used to get letters from guys in prison. Anymore now I don't even open them. They'd ask me to please sign a couple of cards for their children. Then I see them on eBay two weeks later. Or the people that write and say, "You is one of my favorite cartoonists. I would like a drawing, please." I guess they encourage inmates to write letters to celebrities. It's like a way to make money by selling autographs or something. Give me a break. — Mike Royer

Wrong believing puts people in a prison. Even though there are no physical shackles, wrong believing causes its inmates to behave as though they were incarcerated in a maximum-security penitentiary. — Joseph Prince

This was not a simple case of taking an otherwise normal, well-balanced, rational human being, putting him in a bad situation, and suddenly he turns bad," he said. "I faked it." He explained. The first night was boring. Everyone was just sitting around. "I thought, Someone is spending a lot of money to put this thing on and they're not getting any results. So I thought I'd get some action going." He had just seen the Paul Newman prison movie Cool Hand Luke, in which a sadistic southern prison warden played by Strother Martin persecutes the inmates. So Dave decided to channel him. — Jon Ronson

Although prison officials have long battled illegal cellphones, smartphones have changed the game. With Internet access, a prisoner can call up phone directories, maps and photographs for criminal purposes, corrections officials and prison security experts say. Gang violence and drug trafficking, they say, are increasingly being orchestrated online, allowing inmates to keep up criminal behavior even as they serve time. — Kim Severson

The photographs of the inmates at Bergen-Belsen or Andersonville Prison or the bodies in the ditch at My Lai disturb us in a singular fashion because those instances of egregious human cruelty were committed for the most part by baptized Christians. — James Lee Burke

Dr Danson made a series of claims about violent assaults on three prisoners by staff at Barlinnie. Three prison officers subsequently appeared in court charged with assaulting inmates. — Stephen Richards

In the Sapient tongue he said softly, 'Tell
me, Master, did you know Incarceron was tiny?'
'Is it?' Sapphique replied in the same language, his green
eyes as he looked up lit by deep points of flame. 'To you,
perhaps. Not to its Prisoners. Every prison is a universe for
its inmates. And think, Jared Sapiens. Might not the Realm
also be tiny, swinging from the watchchain of some being in
a world even vaster? — Catherine Fisher

If you've ever wondered how many prisons need to operate withinin America, just look at the literacy rate. 60% of America's prison inmates are illiterate and 85% of all juvenile offenders have reading problems. — United States Dept. Of Education

Mo and the staff talk about captivity like it's the best thing a dolphin can hope for, but that kind of talk just makes me think of Carlito and all the years he spent trapped by the routines of prison life in a six-by-nine-foot prison cell, the size of a parking space, and what Dr. Joe used to say about inmates like my brother who were also sentenced to solitary confinement: 'It doesn't have to be violent for it to be torture. — Patricia Engel

The prison population consists of heterogeneous elements; but, taking only those who are usually described as 'the criminals' proper, and of whom we have heard so much lately from Lombroso and his followers, what struck me most as regards them was that the prisons, which are considered as preventive of anti-social deeds, are exactly the institutions for breeding them. Every one knows that absence of education, dislike of regular work, physical incapability of sustained effort, misdirected love of adventure, gambling propensities, absence of energy, an untrained will, and carelessness about the happiness of others are the causes which bring this class of people before the courts. Now I was deeply impressed during my imprisonment by the fact that it is exactly these defects of human nature
each one of them
which the prison breeds in its inmates; and it is bound to breed them because it is a prison, and will breed them so long as it exists. — Pyotr Kropotkin

Everyone who I called my friends, persons who I used to hang out with, these were the individuals who formed and made up the gang known as the Rebellion Raiders. So when the gang was formed I was automatically a part of it, because it was formed by my friends. I didn't have to go out and join the gang. Troit Lynes, former death row inmate of Her Majesty Prison in the Bahamas — Drexel Deal

I would have been content with still playing Inmate #1. I worked on every prison movie made, from 1985 to 1991. I would go from movie to movie to movie. — Danny Trejo

Ten minutes after that and the inmates of Furnace were starting to feel invincible, running around the prison looking for the hidden security cameras and shouting insults at the warden. Some were even flashing their backsides at him, or relieving themselves over the black eyes in the rock, and I couldn't help but laugh as I pictured him sitting in his quarters effectively getting pissed on. — Alexander Gordon Smith

We are all potentially such sick men. The sanest and best of us are of one clay with lunatics and prison-inmates. And whenever we feel this, such a sense of the vanity of our voluntary career comes over us, that all our morality appears as a plaster hiding a sore it can never cure, and all our well-doing as the hollowest substitute for that well-being that our lives ought to be grounded in, but alas! are not so. — William James

Once Incarceron became a dragon, and a Prisoner crawled into his lair. They made a wager. They would ask each other riddles, and the one who could not answer would lose. It it was the man, he would give his life. The Prison offered a secret way of Escape. But even as the man agreed, he felt its hidden laughter.
They played for a year and a day. The lights stayed dark. The dead were not removed. Food was not provided. The Prison ignored the cries of its inmates.
Sapphique was the man. He had one riddle left. He said, "What is the Key that unlocks the heart?"
For a day Incarceron thought. For two days. For three. Then it said, "If I ever knew the answer, I have forgotten it."
Sapphique in the Tunnels of Madness — Catherine Fisher

It is very seldom that any one is in prison for an ordinary crime unless early in life he entered a path that almost invariably led to the prison gate. Most of the inmates are the children of the poor. In many instances they are either orphans or half-orphans; their homes were the streets and byways of big cities, and their paths naturally and inevitably took them to their final fate. — Lyndon B. Johnson

Scott: What's the cure?
Doctor: There is none.
Scott: But that isn't what I heard. The optimist in me translated the gloomy news as "Scott, you will be the first person in the world to be cured of spasmodic dysphonia." And I decided that after I cured myself, somehow, someway, I would spread the word to others. I wouldn't be satisfied escaping from my prison of silence. I was planning to escape, free the other inmates, shoot the warden, and burn down the prison. — Scott Adams

During the first day, curious at having outsiders among them, a long stream of inmates came over and talked with me. Remarkably, according to what they told me, nearly every inmate in the prison didn't do it. Several thousand people had been locked up unjustly and, by an incredible coincidence, all in the same prison.
On the other hand, they knew an awful lot about how to knife somebody. — Alan Alda

accommodate, within reason, the religious practices of workers and applicants unless they impose an "undue hardship" on the business. It is the latest in a line of Supreme Court cases that have elevated religious rights over secular interests, whether exercised by powerful corporations, government agencies or prison inmates. The majority opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia stressed two points that outline the role religion can have in the workplace. Employers must do more than handle religious practices in the same way they do secular ones, he wrote, because federal law gives faith-related expression "favored treatment, affirmatively obligating employers" to accommodate things they could otherwise refuse. Moreover, he wrote, an applicant or employee alleging religious discrimination doesn't have to prove the employer was motivated by bias. — Anonymous

The term 'deinstitutionalization' conceals some simple truths, namely, that old, unwanted persons, formerly housed in state hospitals, are now housed in nursing homes; that young, unwanted persons, formerly also housed in state hospitals, are now housed in prisons or parapsychiatric facilities; and that both groups of inmates are systematically drugged with psychiatric medications. — Thomas Szasz

Chopper Read attended a writing school I gave for inmates at Risdon Prison in Hobart many years ago. Even if I hadn't known about his hacked-off ears and his criminal history, I'd have found him powerful and compelling. — Garry Disher

Changi became my university instead of my prison ... Among the inmates there were experts in all walks of life - the high and the low roads. I studied and absorbed everything I could from physics to counterfeiting, but most of all I learned the art of surviving. — James Clavell

I started out in 1985, and I was Inmate #1 in every prison movie made from '85 to '93. — Kim Coates

In prison, inmates sometimes use Cheetos and grape juice as makeup. I wouldn't use that beauty regimen around Britney Spears - she might lick your face off! — Joel McHale

There is a difference between the inmates of your criminal prisons and the inmates of your cultural prison: The former understand that the distribution of wealth and power inside the prison had nothing to do with justice. — Daniel Quinn

Another difference between psychopaths and other inmates is that psychopaths don't get distressed by being in prison. Most inmates get depressed when they get inside, and they find prison to be a stressful experience. A hallmark feature of psychopaths' disorder is that they don't get bothered by much of anything. They don't ruminate and they don't get depressed. — Kent A. Kiehl

New York Stat agreed to pay $12 million to settle a lawsuit filed three decades ago by inmates swept up in the bloody 1971 revolt at Attica prison. The settlement will be paid in the form of chocolate bars and packs of Newports that can be picked up in the commissary. — Colin Quinn