“Prison is a process, a succession of imprisonments. At first it operates only on a physical level, restricting your movement. Later, it extends to the psychological plane, encompassing your very perception. You come to exclude all thoughts, all visions of the free world.”— Norman Parker, goodreads.com
“It takes between one and two years for prison’s newness to wear off so its awful reality can creep in. Men who commit suicide either do it in the first geyser of shame, within days or weeks, or else after a couple of years, when all has been discovered hopeless. During the interim, no matter how muc…”— Edward Bunker, books.google.com
“Prison is designed to separate, isolate, and alienate you from everyone and everything. You're not allowed to do so much as touch your spouse, your parents, your children. The system does everything within its power to sever any physical or emotional links you have to anyone in the outside world. Th…”— Damien Echols, books.google.com
“I shall never forget how I was roused one night by the groans of a fellow prisoner, who threw himself about in his sleep, obviously having a horrible nightmare. Since I had always been especially sorry for people who suffered from fearful dreams or deliria, I wanted to wake the poor man. Suddenly I…”— Viktor E. Frankl, books.google.com
“During the days I felt myself slipping into a kind of madness. Solitary confinement has an astonishing effect on the mind. The trip was to stay calm and keep myself occupied. I spent hours working out how to break free. But trying to escape would have been instant suicide.”— Tahir Shah, books.google.com
“Often a man endures for several years, submits and suffers the cruelest punishments, and then suddenly breaks out over some minute trifle, almost nothing at all.”— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, books.google.com
“One does not expect to be comfortable in prison. As a matter of fact, one's mental suffering is so much greater than any common physical distress that the latter is almost forgotten.”— Emmeline Pankhurst, books.google.com
“I want to say at the outset that I have become ill, insane as an inmate of a torture chamber behind America's fake facade of justice and democracy. But I am not as ill as I was, and I am getting better all the time.”— Iceberg Slim, books.google.com
“You know who made up that ‘never snitch’ bullshit? People who probably deserved to be snitched on.”— Poussey Washington, tvfanatic.com
“Did ever occur to you that we don't wanna get in touch with our feelings? That actually feeling our feelings might make it impossible to survive in here?”— Poussey Washington, tvfanatic.com
“We are all just in here because we took the wrong turn going to church.”— Poussey Washington, pinterest.com
“Other people aren't the scariest part of prison, Dina, it's coming face-to-face with who you really are. Because once you're behind these walls, there's nowhere to run, even if you could run. The truth catches up with you in here, Dina. And it's the truth that's gonna make you her bitch.”— Piper Chapman, youtube.com
“If the purpose of imprisonment were to socialize men to become as violent as possible -- both while they are there and after they return to the community -- we could hardly find a more effective way to accomplish it.”— James Gilligan, amazon.com
“I'd have murdered my husband years ago, but the only place with more laundry than my house is prison.”— Stabbatha Christ, twitter.com
“When I was on drugs so bad, I talked different. When I was smoking weed, a damn near pound of weed every day, I was congested. When I was drinking lean like crazy every day, I was out my mind. I was always sophisticated, but it ain’t even sophisticated now — it’s just a sober, a more conscious Gucci…”— Gucci Mane, billboard.com
“It was a maximum security prison and it was a lot of violence. People were dying every week. [But] I think it helped me to get to the point I’m at now, to drive me out from the drugs. It gave me time to reflect, it made a lot of relationships that were toxic in my life just fall away.”— Gucci Mane, billboard.com
“The prison therefore functions ideologically as an abstract site into which undesirables are deposited, relieving us of the responsibility of thinking about the real issues afflicting those communities from which prisoners are drawn in such disproportionate numbers. This is the ideological work that…”— Angela Davis, amazon.com
“Well, Black people have actually been in jail for four-hundred years here in America. But I don't worry about jail, I believe in Allah, I believe in Elijah Muhammad — as the messenger of god —and many great men have had to go to jail. So I don't pay attention to it. If the time comes, I'll have to g…”— Muhammad Ali, youtube.com