Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
A. R. Ammons
Whereas robocalls are ever-present, the problem of contraband cellphones in prisons - that is, cellphones illegally being used by inmates - is generally out-of-sight and too easily ignored. But the need for action is just as clear.
Ajit Pai
The problem is that the Iraqi people are facing atrocities from both sides - Zarqawi and also the American troops at times. The Zarqawi groups uses car bombs, the Americans use other bombs. You also know what they do in the prisons.
Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani
Gigantic sums are now required to maintain prisons and insane asylums and protect the public against gangsters and lunatics. Why do we preserve these useless and harmful beings? The abnormal prevent development of the normal.
Alexis Carrel
Many countries persecute their own citizens and intern them in prisons or concentration camps. Oppression is becoming more and more a part of the systems.
Alva Myrdal
Night raids are only the first step in the American detention process in Afghanistan. Suspects are usually sent to one of a series of prisons on U.S. military bases around the country. There are officially nine such jails, called Field Detention Sites in military parlance.
Anand Gopal
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.
Angela Davis
I'm suggesting that we abolish the social function of prisons.
First of all, I didn't suggest that we should simply get rid of all prisons.
We know gang members are pouring across the border and filling up our prisons. We have a huge drug problem in this country now in places that never had an opiate problem. Why is that? Because this is brought in - because we do not have a border.
Ann Coulter
Example and general milieu, once considered so important in the nurture of children, are sacrificed on the altars of the false god we call free choice but which imprisons us all in a collective moral paralysis and delivers an anarchy that the State itself shrinks from challenging.
Ann Widdecombe
The first visit I made to Australia was in 1996 when I was the prisons' minister and was looking at other countries' penal systems.
It is a huge asset to law and order that serious or persistent criminals should be taken out of the society on which they prey. It makes life safer for the law-abiding and on the whole prisons are pretty good at containing those who have been committed to them.
The regime in too many prisons is one of idleness, and locking up someone from such a background in idleness virtually guarantees re-offending. Instead there needs to be a full day's work every weekday in either the workshops or the education department or preferably a mixture of both.
There used to be very few women in prisons, but this changed with the introduction of the hudood laws.
Asma Jahangir
What I have experienced is nothing compared to what political prisoners in prisons suffer.
Aung San Suu Kyi
After the revolution, let us hope, prisons simply would not exist - if by prisons we mean places that could be experienced by the men and women in them at all as every place that goes by that name now is bound to be experienced.
Barbara Deming
All prisons that have existed in our society to date put people away as no human being should ever be put away.
I know that the last thing a book wants is to just sit around unread, serving as an element of interior decorating. So when I have people over, all they have to do is glance at my books, and I implore them to take a few home with them. If I am really ambitious, I pack books into boxes and donate them to prisons.
Barbara Ehrenreich
My movies were the kind they show in prisons and airplanes, because nobody can leave.
Burt Reynolds
Just about every year, Congress passes another crime bill - spending billions of dollars to build more prisons, to place more band-aids on society's scars.
Obama and the Democrats were so critical of what Bush did, the interrogations, the secret prisons, Guantanamo and all of that, and even the war on terror. Obama won't use the word. He's made war on the war on terror.
The status quo tough-on-crime policies of the '90s and 2000s are not working and are not popular. And it provides me with hope about the possibilities for San Francisco and this whole country in terms of moving away from our dependence on prisons and jails to solve social problems.
My earliest memories are going into prisons. Going through metal detectors, getting searched by guards.
We should not have people in prisons and jails who aren't a violent threat.
People who end up in our prisons tend to come from the most difficult backgrounds. They did not have the parental support as they grew up, as many of us enjoyed, and they struggle when they leave prison.
I want prisons to be spartan, but humane, a place people don't have a particular desire to come back to.
I don't feel uncomfortable in forbidding institutions, and work with, say, prisons or psychiatric institutions could be one of the things that evolve out of the Laureateship.
As a left-wing campaigner for 35 years, I've been arrested on picket lines, led anti-imperialist demonstrations and spoken at anti-deportation protests outside police stations. I've made speeches at street rallies, in prisons and universities and at pubs.
When the power of private prisons is diminished, so, too, is their ability to engage in back-door political lobbying that has an impact on public and private prisons alike.
Older prisoners are more expensive for prisons to house because they tend to require more health care over time.
Being incarcerated does not mean being devoid of the capacity to learn, grow, and think, and it's critical that prisons provide spaces where learning can be both cultivated and encouraged.
The moral abhorrence of private prisons has been brought to our attention by courageous acts of investigative journalism, illuminating scholarship, and the work of activists who have decried the social stratification brought about by our prison systems.
The U.S. prison system, over all, disproportionately affects black and brown people, but people of color are overrepresented to a greater degree in private prisons.
All emphasis in American prisons is on punishment, retribution, and disparagement, and almost none is on rehabilitation.
Bullies have played a dirty trick to force me out of office by re-drawing my Congressional district to cover a largely rural area of north Florida and include 22 prisons, and convicted felons can't vote.
Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.
Illegal immigrants are using our resources, taking our jobs, filling our schools, our hospitals and our prisons, and we are paying for it all.
I began visiting Lima's prisons back in 2007, when my first novel, 'Lost City Radio,' was published in Peru.
I believe prisons have emerged as a new frontline in the fight against crime. The fact is, new technology and sophisticated approaches mean that prison walls alone are no longer effective in stopping crime – inside or outside of prison.
Non-custodial sentences are certainly something to look at, more support in the community rather than within prisons is something we have to look at. There will of course still be women who need to be in prison, serious offenders, but I think there is scope to look at that number and I think that number could come down.
The men and women who work in our prisons are the unsung heroes of the criminal justice system.
Prison officers face enormous pressure. The levels of violence inside our prisons are too high.
Prisons are out of public sight, and most often out of mind. But the vast majority of prisoners will at some point leave jail and rejoin our communities, which is why what happens inside matters to us all.
Rules must be established and enforced, and, as numbers are increased in prisons, the necessity for vigilance increases. These rules, let it be understood, may be kindly while firmly enforced. I would never suffer any exhibition of ill-temper or an arbitrary exercise of authority.
The fact is that, in all prisons everywhere, cruelties on the one hand and injudicious laxity of discipline on the other have at times appeared and will, at intervals, be renewed except the most vigilant oversight is maintained.
Dogmas are collective conceptual prisons. And the strange thing is that people love their prison cells because they give them a sense of security and a false sense of 'I know.' Nothing has inflicted more suffering on humanity than its dogmas.
County jails used to be just stopovers for inmates headed to state prisons. But as Arkansas' state facilities have reached capacity, jails are increasingly being used to hold prisoners long term.
I've always been tremendously interested in criminal law. It goes to a deep interest I have in prisons and the criminal element, and what we do as a society with it. I've always been touched by the idea of criminality.
Solitary confinement is too terrible a punishment to inflict on any human being, no matter what his crime. Hardened criminals in the men's prisons, it is said, often beg for the lash instead.
