Survival in here is all about your alliances.
— Steven Zaillian, Richard Price, Freddy Knight, Michael Kenneth Williams, imdb.com
Catalog
Quotes tagged ‘Prison Life’
You know, one of the things you miss in here is being able to say good night to someone that’s not an animal in a fucking zoo.
— Richard Price, Steven Zaillian, Nasir Khan, Riz Ahmed, imdb.com
I stay up at night as long as it takes me to fall asleep or pass out from the hooch or from whatever we have at the time.
Changi [Prison in Singapore] 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.
Prison is a second-by-second assault on the soul, a day-to-day degradation of the self, an oppressive steel and brick umbrella that transforms seconds into hours and hours into days.
You could smell and taste the thick smog in the air. The Blue Triangle was a new high-tech building, and it didn’t look right standing there in front of older and more historical buildings. The Blue Triangle may have looked great from the outside, but once inside, to my horror, it was full of young…
It taught me among other things the relativity of freedom. Solitary confinement is rock bottom, it’s absolute unfreedom.’
Generally speaking, our prisoners were capable of loving animals, and if they had been allowed they would have delighted to rear large numbers of domestic animals and birds in the prison. And I wonder what other activity could better have softened and refined their harsh and brutal natures than this…
The truth is, the prison and its residents fill your thoughts, and it’s hard to remember what it’s like to be free, even after a few short months. You spend a lot of time thinking about how awful the prison is rather than envisioning your future. Nothing about the daily workings of the prison system…
To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.
That is how prison is tearing me up inside. It hurts every day. Every day takes me further from my life. And I am not even conscious of how my dissolution is coming about.
Holloway Prison is a very old place, and it has the disadvantages of old places which have never known enough air and sunshine. It reeks with the odours of generations of bad ventilation, and it contrives to be at once the stuffiest and the draughtiest building I have ever been in. Soon I found myse…
In prison, you get the chance to see who really loves you.
The closest thing to hell on earth is prison. It's the worst experience I've ever had in my life. Besides death.
After doing two years in prison, trust me, I've seen a lot of tough guys pray. They're not just praying for themselves; they're praying for their family and the people they've let down.
Paranoia is an illness I contracted in institutions. It is not the reason for my sentences to reform school and prison. It is the effect, not the cause.
In 1960, when I came out of prison as an ex-convict, I had more freedom under parolee supervision than there's available to an average citizen in America right now.
One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.
[Solitary confinement] is terrible. That is terrible. You're in a grave. You can't do anything. Everything's brought to you and you're in a room all day, except to come out of the showers. So when I would come out, I would entertain myself by singing, doing little mock concerts. And then when I was…
In prison, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.