Prison Conditions Quotes

The degree of civilization in a society can by judged by entering its prisons.

The punishments were whipping, putting you in the stocks and making you wear irons and a chain at work. Then they had a collar to put round your neck with two horns, like cows' horns, so that you could not lie down on your back or belly. This also kept you from running away for the horns would catch in the bushes. Sometimes they dug a hole like a well with a door on top. This they called a dungeon keeping you in it two or three weeks or a month, and sometimes till you died in there. This hole was just big enough to receive the body; the hands down by the sides.

Our nation has invested millions of dollars in building safe, humane and, I may say, air-conditioned facilities to detain and prosecute the detainees at Guantanamo.

Negro children are still sent to prison with adult criminals, and that they leave it half devil and half beast.

It was cold and clammy in the stone cell; they called it the "cooler," and used it to reduce the temperature of the violent and intractable. It was a trouble-saving device; they just left the man there and forgot him, and his own tormented mind did the rest.

President Obama became the first sitting president to visit a federal prison yesterday. Obama said it was a good chance to talk about prison reform, and to catch up with so many former congressmen.

What do people have against convicts? Is living together in the pen of freedom, where young people engage in mutual psychology, any more beautiful?

If a British government experienced such a long and persistent resistance to domestic policy in England, then that policy would almost certainly be changed... We have asserted that we are political prisoners, and everything about out country - our arrests, interrogations, trials, and prison conditions - show that we are politically motivated.

If people around the world knew how well people at Guantanamo Bay are treating prisoners, they would not fall prey to the accusations that some in our Chamber are making. They are all receiving judicial review.

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

When you're in prison, there's no hiding. These women are not hiding behind towels and shower curtains. They go to the bathroom with no doors on the stalls. It would actually look weird, if these women were hiding.

Holloway Prison is a very old place, and it has the disadvantages of old places which have never known enough air and sunshine. It reeks with the odours of generations of bad ventilation, and it contrives to be at once the stuffiest and the draughtiest building I have ever been in.

Prison is a Socialist paradise where equality prevails, everything is supplied, and competition is eliminated.

Then once you get people locked up, it's an incredibly inhuman system.

I think I was the healthiest prisoner of conscience in the world.

The impact of solitary confinement can have a devastating consequence to the psychology of the people who are affected.

Why should our inmates have better housing than our soldiers who fought in the Gulf War.

The only thing worse than working acting in an airplane is working in a prison - they're cold, and the clanging and the noise, it just gets under your skin after a week.

There are thousands of Palestinians in prison virtually for no reason.

We spend ninety-five cents of every dollar for prisons on pure custody; iron bars and stone walls; and they dehumanize. We spend five cents on hope—health mental health, education, vocational training, employment services, family guidance, community services. Most of these inmates have never been to a dentist. Psychoses and neuroses—a major cause of crime—are immense.

Maybe I could survive in one of those resort prisons where they house white-collar criminals. I've always wanted to get better at tennis.

It is not the prisoners who need reformation, it is the prisons.

The prison life of the past looks in our own time like liberation itself.

The prison, above all others, should be the most human of institutions.

The authorities liked to say that we received a balanced diet; it was indeed balanced - between the unpalatable and the inedible.