55 Quotes About Prisons

As a fraction of GDP, the United States spends on job-training and assistance programs barely one-fifth as much as the average among industrialized countries. Moreover, the United States has significantly cut spending on these programs in recent decades, while significantly increasing spending on prisons instead.

Moreover, it is not merely a matter of a few white people being sadistic; whiteness as a category is, in part, maintained by ritualized violence against black people and white consumption of spectacularized images of antiblack violence. (pgs. 91-92)

After a couple of weeks in Polmont, I started to become more assertive and began arguing with older, bigger boys. I loved it. This is where my ugly side would make some scary and unpredictable appearances. Even to this day, I can go from a happy-go-lucky cunt to the devil on acid.

In Polmont, everyone was acting the hard man and giving it the large. I had to fight or cosh or do something to be accepted. I can tell you, it was better to be in a gang than being on your own, and I’d do anything in Polmont, no questions asked!

Bringing this all together, the 1980s become and intensely significant point for the purposes of our understanding of what one could consider the degradation of our prison system and our food system in America: We see at that time period a sharp increase in the rates of diet-related disease, the number of incarcerated people, and the gap between the wealthy and the poor.

America sends its criminals to unseen corners of our society, where they live they live monotonous lives that take away autonomy and choice, and where their time is completely owned by the institution.

States do not grapple with decarceration strategies & explore alternatives bc of an ethical recognition of the continuing harms of prisons or an understanding of the intertwined histories of capitalism, white supremacy, & punishment in the US, but rather bc coffers are empty, and prisons & punishment consume ever-growing portions of shrinking revenues.

It's too bad war makes peopledisappear like chess pieces, and that prisonsturn prisoners into movie endings.

We live in open-air prisons with a wall around us.