Edward Abbey Quotes

I actually worked with an organization called Drama Club that works with incarcerated teens and youth in a detention center and in Rikers Island, which a lot of people don't know that teens have been incarcerated in Rikers Island.

Until you're grown-up they send you to reform school. After you're grown-up they send you to the penitentiary.

How many prison years in the years since Christ!

I believe, and I may be wrong, the system sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. Prison is supposed to rehabilitate, but they don't do that in a lot of cases.

Jail is much easier on people who have nothing.

Imprisonment, as it exists today, is a worse crime than any of those committed by its victims.

Historically, there would always be people among the general population who had family members, friends, cousins who'd done time or who'd been in prison.

One of my younger homies, he went to jail, and some people came to me and were like, "Bail him out," and I said no. Why would I bail him out? He's going to prison. Let him sit and get some time served. You want to be crazy, but you don't want to go to jail. You want to shoot people, but you don't want to kill people. That's such a misleading thing.

Oh, the inmates and the prisoners I found they were my kind And it was there inside the bars I found my peace of mind But the jails they were too crowded Institutions overflowed So they turned me loose to walk upon Life's hurried tangled road

The last place I would ever want to go is prison.

Have not prisons - which kill all will and force of character in man, which enclose within their walls more vices than are met with on any other spot of the globe - always been universities of crime?

I go to correctional facilities and talk to kids there. They have little kids in there who are, like, 12 years old, stealing cars and stuff like that.

I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.

I know what it's like to be ignored, and I think that is the big problem about the prison system: These people are being thrown away. There is no sense of rehabilitation. In some places, they are trying to do things. But, in most cases, it's a holding cell.

Of course it can be said of jails, too, that they try - by punishing the troublesome - to deter others. No doubt, in certain instances this deterrence actually works. But generally speaking it fails conspicuously.

I mean I've never been thrown in jail in New York or Los Angeles.

I should still be in jail.

We make no apology for people who should be in prison being in prison.

Going to prison is like dying with your eyes open.

I'm a prosecutor first and foremost, and as a judge, I put people in jail for extended periods of time when that was appropriate.

Jail was probably the most exciting thing that's ever happened to me.

I just think it's shocking how many of these young people wind up in prison and they get turned into hardcore criminals because they had a possession of a very small amount of controlled substance.

I've definitely become more aware of the penal system and more aware of what life could be like inside a prison.

Prison … for the detention of persons and not for flagellating them or undermining their health.

I'm an equal opportunity incarcerator.