Top 457 Prisons Quotes & Sayings

Are the prisons overpopulated, or is the population over-imprisoned ?

Not all prisons have bars

The war on drugs causes other supplemental crimes to take place because of the original illegality of it. But then again, that's the other reason that they're fighting it is the corporate prisons they have now. Because they've privatized all our prisons, corporations have to make money, and the only way they can make money is, I believe, the prisons have to be at least 80-90 percent full. That's why the United States - which is home of the brave, land of the free - we have more people in prison than any other country in the world.

Schools resemble the culture of prisons.

Are there no prisons?

The leading members of ISIS were either tortured in US military prisons or in the prisons of the Shi'a government which the Americans put in place.

Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?

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

The only thing that prisons demonstrably cure is heterosexuality.

As governor, I am not interested in building more prisons.

I'm an educated man, the prisons I know are subtle ones.

After the revolution, let us hope, prisons simply would not exist - if by prisons we mean places that could be experienced by the men and women in them at all as every place that goes by that name now is bound to be experienced.

We should not have people in prisons and jails who aren't a violent threat.

Prisons should be co-ed because separate quarters are discriminatory.

We need to fight for free education and defund the prisons

I've written about illegal immigrants in the United States; I spent a year following migrant farm workers as they were harvesting. I've written about our criminal justice system, and how it treats the victims of crime. I've been working for years now on a book about prisons in America, and I've been going into prisons and traveling around the country and seeing what's going on.

The belief that all wealth comes from stealing is popular in prisons and at Harvard.

The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.

Prisons are fascinating places, especially when the inmates are educated white-collar types.

More money is put into prisons than into schools. That, in itself, is the description of a nation bent on suicide. I mean, what is more precious to us than our own children? We are going to build a lot more prisons if we do not deal with the schools and their inequalities.

There are no ugly loves nor handsome prisons.

Many a serious thinker has been produced in prisons, where we have nothing to do but think.

Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?

It appears that the murder rate inside prisons is ten times higher than that outside prisons. It must be due to all those Kalashnikov rifles that are issued to prisoners upon their incarceration.

When the power of private prisons is diminished, so, too, is their ability to engage in back-door political lobbying that has an impact on public and private prisons alike.

I've been working in adult prisons and juvenile prisons for some time.

The world of womens' prisons is indeed a microcosm.

And I see the - you know, when I go to the juvenile detention centers and prisons, I see people who can't read now. And I know that when they leave those prisons and those detention centers, they're not going to be able to make it in our society.

Any society's insistence on how it takes democracy seriously can, in fact, be measured by the way it treats its children. And if we take that index as a measure of the United States, it's utterly failing. You have young people basically who - in schools that are increasingly modeled after prisons. You have their behavior being increasingly criminalized. And one of the most atrocious of all acts, you have the rise of debtors' prisons for children.

The only dead bodies from marijuana are in the prisons and at the hands of the police. This is ridiculous.

I think part of why schizophrenia got linked to civil rights protest in the '60s was because mainstream society was coding threats against the smooth running of the state as insanity and treating it as such, and so as that happens you see the evolution of a process in which people with schizophrenia are increasingly feared and our hospitals, particularly the kind of hospital that I look at in the book become to look more and more like prisons, to the point where many of them including the one I talk about actually become prisons.

I know prisons from the inside.

Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.

Most prisons have wide gates!

Prisons are the universities of the opposition.

Our prisons are full of people who think they're Napoleon..or God.

It's simple: put the money into schools and not prisons.

Better to build orphanages than prisons.

Prisons are built with stones of Law. Brothels with the bricks of religion.

I'm suggesting that we abolish the social function of prisons.

Liberty is a dearly bought commodity and prisons are factories where it is manufactured.

Many of us are in are in our own prisons that aren't made of iron bars.

Men simply copied the realities of their hearts when they built prisons.

My dad had a retail business in Leavenworth, Kansas, and there's a whole bunch of prisons there, so it was a backdrop of my childhood, these ominous prisons sitting off the road.

The outer prisons are made by the community to contain those who have dared break its laws. The inner prisons each man makes for himself because of what he feels are his transgressions.

Republican candidate Ben Carson told reporters he thinks American prisons might be too comfortable. As opposed to Mexican prisons that have personal showers with $5 million escape tunnels.

It is not the prisoners who need reformation, it is the prisons.

America needs fewer laws, not more prisons.

We must stop the trend of closing schools and building prisons.

The prison-industrial complex employs millions of people directly and indirectly. Judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, prison guards, construction companies that build prisons, police, probation officers, court clerks, the list goes on and on. Many predominately white rural communities have come to believe that their local economies depend on prisons for jobs.

What I have experienced is nothing compared to what political prisoners in prisons suffer.

There is nothing so confining as the prisons of our own perceptions.

Prisons are universities of crime, maintained by the state.

There are worse prisons than words.

First of all, I didn't suggest that we should simply get rid of all prisons.

Prisons! Prisons! Prisons, dungeons, blessed places where evil is impossible since they are the crossroads of all the malediction in the world. One cannot commit evil in evil.

The fact that's why the prisons and stock in private prisons rose the very day after the election results [for Donald Trump] were announced. The fact that progress that was made for people of color, for women, for LGBTQ people, are all at risk.

Don’t sanctuaries become prisons, and vice versa, foremost in the mind?

Convictions are prisons.

The most dangerous prisons are those with invisible bars