Jail Quotes

“The uncertainty wore on him. The conditions in jail--the handcuffs, the noise, the filth, the crowding--mangled his senses. It's likely that, if one must be incarcerated in the United States, a jail in central Maine would be among the more tolerable spots, but to Knight it was torture. "Bedlam" is how he referred to the place. It never got dark in jail; at eleven p.m., the lights merely became a little duller. "I suspect," he noted, "more damage has been done to my sanity in jail, in months; than years, decades, in the woods.”

“School is a jail, people want there a lot of and when you are out of school what you know from school you remember few and it's useless. So far 12 years at school... (Take it 12 years at jail!)”

“...the court, as now constituted, would be meaningless without the jail which gives it its power. But if there is anything I have learned by being in jail, it is that prisons are wrong, simply and unqualifiedly wrong.”

“I’ve only been to jail a few times, but in several different countries, at that. No, I've only been to jail a few times. But I still claim the ability to write a "serious" novel.”

“I also did some jail time a few years ago. Spent a whole summer in jail reading books. I pumped a ton of new knowledge and new thinking into myself.”

“If you know the rules, it's not anymore interesting the game, but if you don't know them it's interesting... like what's the feeling to be 24 hours at jail, who can you meet at jail. Do you know somebody from the guards...?!”

“My association of jail to high school is probably on the basic similarity of a communicable social-setting. These few settings represent a frame of reference: a somewhat fraternal order (though I never belonged to an actual fraternity) where people collect—and may be confined—and somewhat coalesce on a common cause. Jail was a remarkable and unique experience of fellows/fathers and a force of several….”

“My mom used to get arrested for being with my dad. She would get fined. She would spend weekends in jail.”

“With his release imminent, Knight seems more unsettled than ever. He scratches furiously at his knees. Jail, he's realized, might not be all bad. There's routine and order in jail, and he's able to click into a survival mode that is not too dissimilar, in terms of steeliness of mental state, to the one he'd perfected during winters in the woods. "I'm surrounded in here by less than desirable people," he says, "but at least I wasn't thrown into the waters of society and expected to swim.”