Prisons Quotes

“[Prison] relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism and, increasingly, global capitalism.”
― Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?

“Prisons do not disappear social problems, they disappear human beings. Homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness, and illiteracy are only a few of the problems that disappear from public view when the human beings contending with them are relegated to cages.”
― Angela Davis

“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?”
― Michel Foucault

“Christians talk as though goodness was their idea but good behavior doesn't have any religious origin. Our prisons are filled with the devout.”
― Andy Rooney, Sincerely, Andy Rooney

“Inhumanity is the keynote of stupidity in power.”
― Alexander Berkman, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist

“One of the reasons that so many people of color and poor people are in prison is that the deindustrialization of the economy has led to the creation of new economies and the expansion of some old ones – I have already mentioned the drug trade and the market for sexual services. At the same time, though, there are any number of communities that more than welcome prisons as a source of employment. Communities even compete with one another to be the site where new prisons will be constructed because prisons create a significant number of relatively good jobs for their residents”
― Angela Davis

“Between 1990 and 2005, a new prison opened in the United States every ten days. Prison growth and the resulting “prison-industrial complex”—the business interests that capitalize on prison construction—made imprisonment so profitable that millions of dollars were spent lobbying state legislators to keep expanding the use of incarceration to respond to just about any problem. Incarceration became the answer to everything—health care problems like drug addiction, poverty that had led someone to write a bad check, child behavioral disorders, managing the mentally disabled poor, even immigration issues generated responses from legislators that involved sending people to prison. Never before had so much lobbying money been spent to expand America’s prison population, block sentencing reforms, create new crime categories, and sustain the fear and anger that fuel mass incarceration than during the last twenty-five years in the United States.”
― Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy

“The merciful precepts of Christ will at last suffuse the Code and it will glow with their radiance. Crime will be considered an illness with its own doctors to replace your judges and its hospitals to replace your prisons. Liberty shall be equated with health. Ointments and oil shall be applied to limbs that were once shackled and branded. Infirmities that once were scourged with anger shall now be bathed with love. The cross in place of the gallows: sublime and yet so simple.”
― Victor Hugo, The Last Day of a Condemned Man

“The least I can do is speak out for the hundreds of chimpanzees who, right now, sit hunched, miserable and without hope, staring out with dead eyes from their metal prisons. They cannot speak for themselves.”
― Jane Goodall

“All these institutions [prisons] seemed purposely invented for the production of depravity and vice, condensed to such a degree that no other conditions could produce it, and for the spreading of this condensed depravity and vice broadcast among the whole population.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Resurrection

“Scratch a female inmate, I've discovered, and you'll usually find a girl whose mother had terrible taste in men.”
― Cammie McGovern, Neighborhood Watch

“Crime was not a cause, but a result; the prisons were the open sores of a diseased social body.”
― Irving Stone, Clarence Darrow for the Defense

“In Switzerland, 20% of police stations and prisons have at least one pink cell, using the color blancmange pink or “Baker-Miller pink” that was named after the two US Naval officers who first studied the effects that pink prison walls had on occupants.
This color is widely used in the holding cells for prisoners to reduce violent and aggressive behavior, with some officials reporting lower muscle strength in under five seconds.”
― Cary G. Weldy, The Power of Tattoos: Twelve Hidden Energy Secrets of Body Art Every Tattoo Enthusiast Should Know

“However, to maintain a good credit rating during periods when revenue is lagging, municipalities must fuck over residents by implementing austerity measures such as firing public employees, cutting pension funds and health-care benefits, weakening the power of labor unions, cutting the education budget, and so forth.”
― Jackie Wang, Carceral Capitalism

“Anger and grief were intense and debilitating, warping everything beyond recognition. The prison that held my body was trivial by comparison. My true prison was the one that held my soul.

[Maria Florkowska]”
― Gabriella Saab, The Last Checkmate

“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.”
― Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy

“Lots of people are all cold and heartless. Who do you think works in a prison? Who do you think works on death row? It's a job.”
― Jessamine Chan, The School for Good Mothers

“A prison will appear like heaven to those who are in hell.”
― Tamerlan Kuzgov

“In April 2014 a settlement agreement was reached in court, and Detroit had to pay $85 million to USB AG and Bank of America Corporation to terminate the swaps. The use of variable-rate instruments, such as swaps, to finance debt was the single "biggest contributing factor to the increase in Detroit's legacy expenses.”
― Jackie Wang, Carceral Capitalism

“In the slave narrative of Moses Grandy, an especially brutal form of whipping is described in which the woman was required to lie on the ground with her stomach positioned in a hole, whose purpose was to safeguard the fetus (conceived as future slave labor).”
― Angela Y. Davis

“The issue of incarceration itself—including not just political prisoners but the prison as a system—needs to be framed as a fundamental question of building and defending our movements. This is a movement rooted in care: It means supporting prisoners as part of a movement culture where people care for one another, create new bonds of solidarity, and celebrate people’s history. This is a movement focused on shrinking the state’s capacity to repress: It means working to close prisons, end solitary confinement, free prisoners, eliminate borders. It means embedding direct challenges to the carceral state within social struggles while working to popularize a wider set of radical politics. While no one organization can do everything, a successful anti-prison movement will need to synthesize direct action, popular relevancy, and radical critique. To separate these approaches is to grant victory to the prison state.”
― Dan Berger, The Struggle Within: Prisons, Political Prisoners, and Mass Movements in the United States

“The four major testing companies—Pearson Education, Educational Testing Service, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and McGraw Hill—make $2 billion a year in revenue while spending $20 million a year lobbying for more mandated student assessments. Prisons bring in $70 billion a year in revenue, and its industry spends $45 million a year lobbying to keep people incarcerated and for longer sentences.”
― Bettina L. Love, We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom

“Clint Low, the sheriff of Mason County in Texas, told the Associated Press that pink walls were used to calm tempers at the cramped prison. Built in 1894, the tiny jail is a historical site and does not need to conform to the guidelines of the state prison.

The sheriff also reported that the reoffending rate was down by a staggering 70 percent since introducing the color pink in the prison, and that no fights occurred among inmates since the walls were painted pink.”
― Cary G. Weldy, The Power of Tattoos: Twelve Hidden Energy Secrets of Body Art Every Tattoo Enthusiast Should Know

“Paddocks are just prisons that we fail to see.”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“My great worry is the problem of poverty…Instead of prisons, I would have schools, art and vocational academies, free trade, free love, the abolition of marriage and the substitution of private property for public property.”
― Luisa Capetillo

“Why the fuck are you naked?" he demanded.

"It's how I express my inner crea-tiv-it-ai," he said innocently. "I need to be free of clothes when I paint, it is my way, sir.”
― Caroline Peckham, Alpha Wolf

“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.”
― Wajahat Ali, Go Back to Where You Came From: And Other Helpful Recommendations on How to Become American

“Freedom is a prison for some prisoners.”
― Tamerlan Kuzgov

“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.”
― Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

“Freedom is the cage, and the cage is never freedom.”
― Tamerlan Kuzgov