Lou Duva Quotes

As soon as I ended up being incarcerated, I said, you know, this is not the life for me.

We spend $94,000 per prisoner [per year]. There is a tension between punishment and making people’s lives better and I don’t actually think that we have done the second part well. We put people in prison and expect them to come out

Prison life, fortunately, I spent a lot of years, about 18 years with other prisoners, and, as I say, they enriched your soul.

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.

Well I certainly have learned and I hope I'm moving on and certainly two years of prison was a terrible punishment.

I used to teach acting in a maximum security men's prison. I worked with guys with the most dysfunctional behavior problems. I probably learned more there than from my prestigious theater degree.

The way to reform has always led through prison.

I don't even think jail helps Gucci Mane. It clearly doesn't.

Unless we address those that are leaving prisons, we can't begin to repair the damage of mass incarceration and make our communities whole and healthy once again.

Prisons are out of public sight, and most often out of mind. But the vast majority of prisoners will at some point leave jail and rejoin our communities, which is why what happens inside matters to us all.

The most important issue is clearly not the quality of treatment and care of these prisoners; rather it is the perplexing issue of what we now do with them.

All emphasis in American prisons is on punishment, retribution, and disparagement, and almost none is on rehabilitation.

The second time I went to jail, I was like, 'Okay, this is not the move.'

It would be like the films I've seen where wardens would decide to be in a jail cell for a week, to get a sense of what it would be like to be a prisoner.

Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.

We need prisons because there are some hardcore criminals, but I never met a guy who has been in jail that came out with a smile on his face thinking, 'Right, that's it - now I am going to be good!'

I'm eternally grateful to the penal system in California for saving my life.

When you're in prison, the progress of the outside world doesn't necessarily translate inside prison walls. You don't have any rights; it just doesn't progress along the same timeline.

Prisons are universities of the opposition.

The head of a penal institution is more important to the progress of society than the president of a university. His task is more difficult: he must be more resourceful; he must have a combination of culture, education, business ability, and personal character of the highest order; all backed up by a physique that will carry him through continuous experiences such as will break the health, vision, and optimism of most men.

A reform in the system of criminal jurisprudence, by which the death penalty shall no longer be inflicted; and by which, during that term, a portion of the prison employment shall be for, and the product thereof be faithfully paid over to, the support of the criminal’s family; and by which our so-called prisons shall be virtually transformed into vast reformatory workshops, from which the unfortunate may emerge to be useful members of society, instead of the alienated citizens they now are.

I grew up in Huntsville, which is a main prison town. It's crazy. The conditions are so bad in prison, often, for the inmates.

I don't often do a lot of that kind of research, but when it's something specific like 'Oz' - which I fortunately did not have a lot of experience with - I will. I read 'The Hot House,' about being on the inside at Leavenworth prison.

No one can say, 'I have dropped out - I am no longer in the system.' When you're in prison, you're even closer to the system: you feel it more, and you might be in there for whatever reason. You don't transform the system as an absolute thing.

After six prison commitments, at the end of those, I was more broken than when I went into the system.