55 Quotes About Prisons

Inhumanity is the keynote of stupidity in power.

The least I can do is speak out for the hundreds of chimpanzees who, right now, sit hunched, miserable and without hope, staring out with dead eyes from their metal prisons. They cannot speak for themselves.

We have glorified wealth and freedom so much that it is impossible for most of us to truly believe that a man can truly be happy in a shack or within the confines of a prison cell.

The four major testing companies—Pearson Education, Educational Testing Service, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and McGraw Hill—make $2 billion a year in revenue while spending $20 million a year lobbying for more mandated student assessments. Prisons bring in $70 billion a year in revenue, and its industry spends $45 million a year lobbying to keep people incarcerated and for longer sentences.

Schools can therefore be seen as the most powerful alternative to jails and prisons. Unless the current structures of violence are eliminated from schools in impoverished comummities of color-including the presence of armed security guards and police-and unless schools become places that encourage the joy of learning, these schools will remain the major conduits to prisons.

Christians talk as though goodness was their idea but good behavior doesn't have any religious origin. Our prisons are filled with the devout.

Where an open war is impossible, oppression can continue quietly behind the scenes. Terrorism. Guerrilla warfare, violence, prisons, concentration camps. I ask you: Is this peace?The true antipode of peace is violence. And those who want peace in the world should remove not only war from the world but also violence. If there is no open war but there is still violence, that is not peace.

One of the most infuriating elements of American myopia about investing in at-risk kids is that politicians often insist that they don't have the funds to pay for social services--but they somehow find the resources to pay for prisons later on.

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?