If I wasn't a champion, I'd still be in jail. That makes me try very hard.

If I wanted to develop a scenario to destroy America, I would do what the Republicans are doing. Take the brightest and best young black men off the streets, put them in jail, make them meaner than hell for 8 or 10 years and then turn them lose in a society where there are plenty of guns for them to play with.

Jails and prisons are designed to break human beings, to convert the population into specimens in a zoo - obedient to our keepers, but dangerous to each other.

My school, we affectionately nicknamed it Avonjail, but it was called Avondale, Avondale high school in Stockport. I left with no GCSEs above a D.

I've been to Villawood Detention Centre in Sydney and it's all barbed wire, it's like a big jail.

One of my best moments was getting a constituent out of jail in Morocco, by which of course I mean I got him released not that I sprung him.

Well, the terrible thing right now, and I don't know the statistics, but there's a growing concern in some communities about how rapidly people are sent from school to jail, how quickly they're put into the criminal justice system. And of course the rapidly growing number of brown people, both men and women, in prison. And this is terrible.

'The Red' is the first book in a trilogy that gained a big following as a self-published e-book, and is now out in paper from Saga. It introduces us to reluctant hero Shelley, a former anti-war activist who chooses to join the military rather than serve jail time after being arrested at a protest.

If you do things, whether it's acting or music or painting, do it without fear - that's my philosophy. Because nobody can arrest you and put you in jail if you paint badly, so there's nothing to lose.

People who do crime do it for reward. But you end up in jail - that's no reward. Through crime, your ambitions are low.

If it wasn't for my sport and my father, I'd probably be a fallen statistic. I'd be dead; I'd be in jail. Luckily, I had a great dad in my life.

My dad spent most of my childhood behind bars. He went to jail 17 or 18 times. It was only when he was diagnosed with cancer in 2004 that we started to have a relationship.

The main thing I learned in jail was how much I love my kids, that I never want to be away from them again.

What can I do if everyone from the president to a junior bureaucrat is dying to convict me. If I am such a criminal, what was I doing outside jail before my marriage to Benazir?

As an independent person, I find it difficult being dependent for everything, for even my food and medicine, to the prison authorities. I have had to fight through the courts for everything, including even physiotherapy, which is my right under the jail manual.

Even before his detention, my father was fighting many cases. He remained in jail in Multan. He remained in jail in Bannu. But we were not allowed to go see him there. We always saw him in courts. So for me, the courts were a place where you dressed up to see your father. It had a very nice feeling to it.

My father was jailed off and on for seven years.

When the Bangladesh war happened, people in Pakistan who did not support it were called unpatriotic. My father was in the jail at that time, and a lot of those who knew my family used to call us children of a traitor.

I've been jailed once, put in police lock-up twice, and was under house arrest twice.

I have never seen any BJP leader going to jail during the freedom struggle; it was only Congressmen who sacrificed for this country.

I had to go to jail, which was probably the most humbling thing I've ever had to deal with in my life.

You could make the most beautiful film, and that weekend it's raining too hard on the East Coast, and no one goes out. Artists should have a chance to do it again. That's the challenge: Women artists don't get a second chance. People-of-color artists don't get a second chance. You're put in director's jail, and that's a wrap.

You see women struggling to keep it all together while a loved one is in jail. But we don't hear about them or their struggles in a way that resonates with others. Their stories are so compelling. It's as if they are in their own little world and no one else sees them.

We spoke at endless cabinet meetings about the need to stop the flow of money to the families of terrorists and to the terrorists in jails.

You have young men of color in many communities who are more likely to end up in jail or in the criminal justice system than they are in a good job or in college. And, you know, part of my job, that I can do, I think, without any potential conflicts, is to get at those root causes.

Of course it can be said of jails, too, that they try - by punishing the troublesome - to deter others. No doubt, in certain instances this deterrence actually works. But generally speaking it fails conspicuously.

And unless you think there is a serious chance you're going to jail, don't listen to your lawyer.

I went to jail at 16 for stealing tires off Cadillacs. When I got out I said, Never again.

The most powerful person can wind up in jail.

Jail is much easier on people who have nothing.

The voice I have now, I got the first time I sang in a movement meeting, after I got out of jail... and I'd never heard it before in my life.