Since 1957, black people have experienced double-digit unemployment - in good times and bad times. Look at the population of African Americans in prison. They represent more than half the population of prisoners in the country, 55 percent of those on death row.
Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?
If you share the crime of your friend, you make it your own.
When is conduct a crime, and when is a crime not a crime? When Somebody Up There -- a monarch, a dictator, a Pope, a legislator -- so decrees.
We who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments.
Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
In my country we go to prison first and then become President.
Extreme justice is extreme injustice.
No man should be judge in his own case.
In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.
He who opens a school door, closes a prison.
Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X came out of prison stronger.
Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.
On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break.
I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.
Reality becomes a prison to those who can’t get out of it.
To be at peace in crime! Ah, who can thus flatter himself.
While crime is punished it yet increases.
Here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to be to restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work.
The contagion of crime is like that of the plague. Criminals collected together corrupt each other; they are worse than ever when at the termination of their punishment they re-enter society.
America is the land of the second chance – and when the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life.
The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.
We are prisoners of ideas.
