Prison Quotes

“We care (about prison education), very simply, because (prisoners) get out. Almost everyone who is locked up now is going to be set free one day. If we treat prisoners like animals the whole time they are locked up, that's what we'll get when they're back on the streets: wild, dangerous animals.”

“You are as free as a prisoner in an open air prison”

“Only prisoners were ever granted easy passage into a prison.”

“Much of the way food has been shaped and formed in prisons is due to the cultural thought about prisoners in general, and how they should be treated by society and by the state. Food in prison is a reflection of culture and cultural thinking about criminal justice and reform.”

“There is a difference between the inmates of your criminal prisons and the inmates of your cultural prison: The former understand that the distribution of wealth and power inside the prison had nothing to do with justice.”

“No matter how well meaning and astute the investigators are or how well-researched, witnessed and documented the incidents of cruelty are, a prison is a prison is a prison. The structure of authority that produces the oppressed and the oppressor alike is the key to understanding the problem. Contained within this structure is the authoritative power to agendize language, which is simply another control mechanism.”

“The only prison we can be is prison of our mind.”

“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?”

“It was clearly a prisoner's craftwork; that is, the most painstaking work in the world, for prisoners have nowhere to hurry to.”

“When people become prisoners of daily habits and happen to be hostages of choices, which they made in the past, but which they finally do not actually want, they experience the need to abandon their corporeal prison at a certain time in life. ( "Corporeal prison" )”