Prison Quotes

Women now have choices. They can be married, not married, have a job, not have a job, be married with children, unmarried with children. Men have the same choice we've always had: work, or prison.

Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.

The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.

The uneven impact of actual enforcement measures tends to mirror and reinforce more general patterns of discrimination (along socioeconomic, racial and ethnic, sexual, and perhaps generational lines) within the society. As a consequence, such enforcement (ineffective as it may be in producing conformity) almost certainly reinforces feelings of alienation already prevalent within major segments of the population.

I have been studying how I may compare this prison where I live unto the world; Shut up in the prison of their own consciences.

The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.

It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their own kind.

To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.

It was only when I lay there on the rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not between states nor between social classes nor between political parties, but right through every human heart, through all human hearts. And that is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me, bless you, prison, for having been a part of my life.

Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X came out of prison stronger.

Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.

I can work for the Lord in or out of prison.