Prison

The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons. ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky

A prison, correctional facility, penitentiary, gaol (Ireland, England, Scotland, Wales), or jail is a facility in which inmates are forcibly confined and denied a variety of freedoms under the authority of the state as a form of punishment. The most common use of prisons is as part of a criminal justice system, in which individuals officially charged with or convicted of crimes are confined to a jail or prison until they are either brought to trial to determine their guilt or complete the period of incarceration they were sentenced to after being found guilty at their trial.

In some legal systems some of these terms have distinct meanings. For instance, in the United States, "jail" and "prison" refer to separate levels of incarceration; generally speaking, jails are county or city-administrated institutions which house both inmates awaiting trial on the local level and convicted misdemeanants serving a term of one year or less, while prisons are state or federal facilities housing convicted felons serving a term of more than one year.

Quotes

Changi became my university instead of my prison. … Among the inmates there were experts in all walks of life — the high and the low roads. ~ James Clavell

Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons? ~ Michel Foucault

Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage,
Minds innocent and quiet take
That for an hermitage. ~ Richard Lovelace

If a captive mind is unaware of being in prison, it is living in error. ~ Simone Weil

Remember those in prison as if you were their fellow prisoners, and those who are mistreated as if you yourselves were suffering. ~ Epistle to the Hebrews

• At the risk of quoting Mephistopheles I repeat: Welcome to hell. A hell erected and maintained by human-governments, and blessed by black robed judges. A hell that allows you to see your loved ones, but not to touch them. A hell situated in America's boondocks, hundreds of miles away from most families. A white, rural hell, where most of the captives are black and urban. It is an American way of death.
  • Mumia Abu-Jamal, All Things Censored (2001, Seven Stories Press), pp. 55-56

• Bradley Manning has been imprisoned without charge, under torture, which is what solitary confinement is.
  • Noam Chomsky [1]

• Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilisation.
  • Winston Churchill, letter to Home Secretary Herbert Morrison (November 21, 1943); Churchill, Closing the Ring (vol. 5 of The Second World War; 1951), p. 679.

• Changi became my university instead of my prison. … Among the inmates there were experts in all walks of life — the high and the low roads. I studied and absorbed everything I could from physics to counterfeiting, but most of all I learned the art of surviving.
  • James Clavell, as quoted in "James Clavell, Best-Selling Storyteller of Far Eastern Epics, Is Dead at 69" by William Grimes in The New York Times (8 September 1994)

• While there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.
  • Eugene V. Debs, Statement to the Court Upon Being Convicted of Violating the Sedition Act, September 18, 1918

• "And a bird-cage, sir," said Sam. "Veels vithin veels, a prison in a prison."
  • Charles Dickens, Pickwick Papers (1836), Chapter XL

• A prison taint was on everything there. The imprisoned air, the imprisoned light, the imprisoned damps, the imprisoned men, were all deteriorated by confinement. As the captive men were faded and haggard, so the iron was rusty, the stone was slimy, the wood was rotten, the air was faint, the light was dim. Like a well, like a vault, like a tomb, the prison had no knowledge of the brightness outside; and would have kept its polluted atmosphere intact, in one of the spice islands of the Indian Ocean.
  • Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit, book 1, chapter 1 (1855), p. 4.

• The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
  • Fyodor Dostoevsky, The House of the Dead (1861); reported as unverified in Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1989).

• Mr. Emerson visited Thoreau at the jail, and the meeting between the two philosophers must have been interesting and somewhat dramatic. The account of the meeting was told me by Miss Maria Thoreau [Henry Thoreau's aunt]—"Henry, why are you here?" Waldo, why are you not here?
  • Attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Arthur Samuel Jones, Thoreau's Incarceration [As Told by His Jailer], p. 15 (1962). This exchange was supposed to have taken place on July 23 or 24, 1846, in the Concord, Massachusetts, jail where Thoreau was placed for nonpayment of poll taxes. There are many versions of this story, but Thoreau's account does not mention a visit by Emerson, in his Reform Papers, ed. Wendell Glick (1973), p. 79–84, so it is probably apocryphal.

• Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?
  • Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish (1977) as translated by Alan Sheridan, p. 228

• I will go to prison. I will be in the Gazette. I will move to a meaner situation, or anything else that is necessary.
  • William Godwin letter to James Marshal. William Godwin by William H. Marshal pg. 277

• 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.
  • Jane Goodall as reported in Janelle Rohr, Animal rights: opposing viewpoints (1989), p. 100; Jane Goodall and Jennifer Lindsey, Jane Goodall: 40 Years at Gombe (1999), p. 6. Occasionally misreported in truncated form, as "The least I can do is speak out for those who cannot speak for themselves", in, e.g., quote honored on EarthE eco money.

• Remember those in prison as if you were their fellow prisoners, and those who are mistreated as if you yourselves were suffering.
  • Epistle to the Hebrews 13:3

• We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known. They have known for thousands of years that to lock a sick person into solitary confinement makes him worse. They have known for thousands of years that a poor man who is frightened of his landlord and of the police is a slave. They have known it. We know it. But do the great enlightened mass of the British people know it? No. It is our task, Ella, yours and mine, to tell them. Because the great men are too great to be bothered. They are already discovering how to colonise Venus and to irrigate the moon. That is what is important for our time. You and I are the boulder-pushers. All our lives, you and I, we’ll put all our energies, all our talents into pushing a great boulder up a mountain. The boulder is the truth that the great men know by instinct, and the mountain is the stupidity of mankind.
  • Doris Lessing Paul Tanner, in "Free Women: 1"

• The law of nations knows of no distinction of color, and if an enemy of the United States should enslave and sell any captured persons of their army, it would be a case for the severest retaliation, if not redressed upon complaint.
  • The Lieber Code of 1863, United States Department of War.

• Stone walls do not a prison make,
  Nor iron bars a cage,
  Minds innocent and quiet take
  That for an hermitage.
  • Richard Lovelace, "To Althea, From Prison" (1642)

• Happiness is a prison, Evey. Happiness is the most insidious prison of all.
  • Alan Moore, V for Vendetta

• Show me a prison, show me a jail
  Show me a pris'ner whose face has grown pale
  And I'll show you a young man
  With many reasons why
  There but for fortune, go you or I.
  • Phil Ochs, in "There but for Fortune" (1963)

• Over the past three decades, the number of prison inmates in the United States has increased by more than 600%, leaving it the country with the highest incarceration rate in the world. During this time, incarceration has changed from a punishment reserved primarily for the most heinous offenders to a much greater range of crimes and a much larger segment of the population.
  • Devah Pager (15 March 2024), The Mark of a Criminal Record, 108, The American Journal of Sociology, pp. 937-975 

• Doubles grilles à gros cloux,
  Triples portes, forts verroux,
  Aux âmes vraiment méchantes
  Vous représentez l'enfer:
  Mais aux âmes innocentes
  Vous n'etes que du bois, des pierres, du fer.
  • Fast closed with double grills
    And triple gates—the cell
    To wicked souls is hell;
    But to a mind that's innocent
    'Tis only iron, wood and stone.
  • Paul Pellisson, written on the walls of his cell in the Bastile (c. 1661)

• The newspapers are gonna be tough on you. And prison is very, very hard on people who hurt kids. If you get the opportunity, you should kill yourself.
  • "Rust" Cohle, played by Matthew McConaughey, True Detective (TV series), Haunted House, written by Nic Pizzolatto

• Nor stony tower, nor walls of beaten brass,
  Nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron,
  Can be retentive to the strength of spirit;
  But life, being weary of these worldly bars,
  Never lacks power to dismiss itself.
  • William Shakespeare, Julius Cæsar (1599), Act I, scene 3, line 93

• I have been studying how I may compare
  This prison where I live unto the world:
  And for because the world is populous
  And here is not a creature but myself,
  I cannot do it; yet I'll hammer it out.
  • William Shakespeare, Richard II (c. 1595), Act V, scene 5, line 1

• Might I but through my prison once a day
  Behold this maid: all corners else o' the earth
  Let liberty make use of; space enough
  Have I in such a prison.
  • William Shakespeare, The Tempest (c. 1610-1612), I:2, Ferdinand

• And, for thou wast a spirit too delicate
  To act her earthy and abhorr'd commands,
  Refusing her grand hests, she did confine thee,
  By help of her more potent ministers
  And in her most unmitigable rage,
  Into a cloven pine; within which rift
  Imprison'd thou didst painfully remain
  A dozen years; within which space she died
  And left thee there; where thou didst vent thy groans
  As fast as mill-wheels strike.
  • William Shakespeare, The Tempest (c. 1610-1612), II:2, Prospero, speaking to Ariel

• If they lock me up, at least I'll have a place to stay.
  • Mike Tyson, as quoted in ESPN.

• Les objets extérieurs ont une action réelle sur le cerveau. Qui s’enferme entre quatre murs finit par perdre la faculté d’associer les idées et les mots. Que de prisonniers cellulaires devenus imbéciles, sinon fous, par le défaut d’exercice des facultés pensantes.
  • External objects produce decided effects upon the brain. A man shut up between four walls soon loses the power to associate words and ideas together. How many prisoners in solitary confinement become idiots, if not mad, for want of exercise for the thinking faculty!
    • Jules Verne, Ch. XXVI: The worst peril of all

• If a captive mind is unaware of being in prison, it is living in error. If it has recognized the fact, even for the tenth of a second, and then quickly forgotten it in order to avoid suffering, it is living in falsehood. Men of the most brilliant intelligence can be born, live and die in error and falsehood. In them, intelligence is neither a good, nor even an asset. The difference between more or less intelligent men is like the difference between criminals condemned to life imprisonment in smaller or larger cells. The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like a condemned man who is proud of his large cell.
  • Simone Weil, in "Human Personality" ('c. 1933), in Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986), edited by Siân Miles, p. 69

• I never saw sad men who looked
  With such a wistful eye
  Upon that little tent of blue
  We prisoners called the sky,
  And at every careless cloud that passed
  In happy freedom by.
  • Oscar Wilde, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898)

• The Americans have always been more open to my ideas. In fact, I could earn a living in America just by lecturing. One of my brightest audiences, incidentally, were the prisoners in a Philadelphia gaol — brighter than my students at university.
  • Colin Wilson, Interview with Paul Newman in Abraxas Unbound #7

Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations

Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 634.

• In durance vile here must I wake and weep,
  And all my frowsy couch in sorrow steep.
  • Robert Burns, Epistle from Esopus to Maria in Chambers' Burns' Life and Work, Volume IV

• Whene'er with haggard eyes I view
  This dungeon that I'm rotting in,
  I think of those companions true
  Who studied with me at the U-
  Niversity of Göttingen.
  • George Canning, song, Of One Eleven Years in Prison. Found in The Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin. Also in Burlesque Plays and Poems, edited by Henry Morley

• Prison'd in a parlour snug and small,
  Like bottled wasps upon a southern wall.
  • William Cowper, Retirement, line 493

• As if a wheel had been in the midst of a wheel.
  • Ezekiel. X. 10

• In durance vile.
  • William Kendrick, Falstaff's Wedding, Act I, scene 2. Burke, Thoughts on the Present Discontent.

• That which the world miscalls a jail,
  A private closet is to me.
  * * * * *
  Locks, bars, and solitude together met,
  Make me no prisoner, but an anchoret.
  • Attributed to Sir Roger L'Estrange. Also to Lord Capel. Found in the New Foundling Hospital for Wit (Ed. 1786), IV. 40, as a supplementary stanza. See Notes and Queries (April 10, 1909), p. 288

External links

Inmates Search USA