28 Quotes About The Haunting Reality Of Life In Prison
Going to prison is like dying with your eyes open.
Tim Sirlane
September 24, 2016
September 24, 2016
“I want to say at the outset that I have become ill, insane as an inmate of a torture chamber behind America's fake facade of justice and democracy. But I am not as ill as I was, and I am getting better all the time.”
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Prison, Prison Life
“One does not expect to be comfortable in prison. As a matter of fact, one's mental suffering is so much greater than any common physical distress that the latter is almost forgotten.”
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Prison, Prison Life
“Often a man endures for several years, submits and suffers the cruelest punishments, and then suddenly breaks out over some minute trifle, almost nothing at all.”
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Prison, Prison Life
“I shall never forget how I was roused one night by the groans of a fellow prisoner, who threw himself about in his sleep, obviously having a horrible nightmare. Since I had always been especially sorry for people who suffered from fearful dreams or deliria, I wanted to wake the poor man. Suddenly I drew back the hand which was ready to shake him, frightened at the thing I was about to do. At that moment I became intensely conscious of the fact that no dream, no matter how horrible, could be as bad as the reality of the camp which surrounded us, and to which I was about to recall him.”
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Prison, Prison Life
“Prison is designed to separate, isolate, and alienate you from everyone and everything. You're not allowed to do so much as touch your spouse, your parents, your children. The system does everything within its power to sever any physical or emotional links you have to anyone in the outside world. They want your children to grow up without ever knowing you.They want your spouse to forget your face and start a new life. They want you to sit alone, grieving, in a concrete box, unable even to say your last farewell at a parent's funeral.”
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Prison, Prison Life
“It takes between one and two years for prison’s newness to wear off so its awful reality can creep in. Men who commit suicide either do it in the first geyser of shame, within days or weeks, or else after a couple of years, when all has been discovered hopeless. During the interim, no matter how much agony the man may feel, he also experiences excitement, the excitement of learning how to cope with a closed society that reflects free society as a funhouse mirror reflects the human form: everything is there, but distorted.”
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Prison, Prison Life
“Prison is a process, a succession of imprisonments. At first it operates only on a physical level, restricting your movement. Later, it extends to the psychological plane, encompassing your very perception. You come to exclude all thoughts, all visions of the free world.”
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Prison, Prison Life
“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.”
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.”
Tagged:
Prison, Prison Life
“It was only when I lay there on the rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the fIrst stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not between states nor between classes nor between political parties, but right through every human heart, through all human hearts. And that is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me, ‘Thank you, prison, for having been in my life.’”
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Prison, Prison Life
“I know not whether Laws be right or whether Laws be wrong; all that we know who live in gaol is that the wall is strong; and that each day is like a year, a year whose days are long.”
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Prison, Prison Life
“During the entire incarceration process, from arrest to detainment to prosecution to conviction to prison to parole, you realize that the ONLY people who are nice to you are other inmates. You’ll meet a lot of cold-blooded prosecutors and sadistic guards, a lot of do-gooders on the 'right' side of the law who are paid to harm you and who laugh at the very idea that you’re human. But unless you go out of your way to be an asshole to other inmates, they’ll help you a lot more than they’ll hurt you.”
—
Jim Goad
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Prison, Prison Life
“There is a close relationship between flowers and convicts. The fragility and delicacy of the former are of the same nature as the brutal insensitivity of the latter.”
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Prison, Prison Life
“I was given a cell occupied by five other men. It was infested with vermin, and sewer rates scurried back and further over the floors of that human cesspool in such numbers that it was almost impossible for me to place my feet on the stone floor. Those rats were nearly as big as cats, and vicious.”
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Prison, Prison Life
“In prison, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.”
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Prison, Prison Life
“[Solitary confinement] is terrible. That is terrible. You're in a grave. You can't do anything. Everything's brought to you and you're in a room all day, except to come out of the showers. So when I would come out, I would entertain myself by singing, doing little mock concerts. And then when I was in the room, I would develop a routine. Like I have a lot of hair under here, so I would take my hair down and take all day to braid it on purpose. Stretch the hours out. Then I might write. And I would clean the floor. And I would look out the window. And then I'd devote a whole day to just reading. I was Christian then, trying to be. So I would read the whole Bible. I would break it down into sections. You're in a grave and you're trying to live. That's how to best describe it: trying to live in a grave. You're trying to live 'cause you're not dead yet, but nobody hears you when you call out, 'Hey, I'm alive!’”
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Prison, Prison Life
“Paranoia is an illness I contracted in institutions. It is not the reason for my sentences to reform school and prison. It is the effect, not the cause.”
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Prison, Prison Life
“Holloway Prison is a very old place, and it has the disadvantages of old places which have never known enough air and sunshine. It reeks with the odours of generations of bad ventilation, and it contrives to be at once the stuffiest and the draughtiest building I have ever been in. Soon I found myself sickening for fresh air. My head began to ache. Sleep fled. I lay all night suffering with cold, gasping for air, aching with fatigue, and painfully wide awake.”
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Prison, Prison Life
“That is how prison is tearing me up inside. It hurts every day. Every day takes me further from my life. And I am not even conscious of how my dissolution is coming about.”
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Prison, Prison Life
“To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.”
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Prison, Prison Life
“The truth is, the prison and its residents fill your thoughts, and it’s hard to remember what it’s like to be free, even after a few short months. You spend a lot of time thinking about how awful the prison is rather than envisioning your future. Nothing about the daily workings of the prison system focuses its inhabitants’ attention on what life back on the outside, as a free citizen, will be like. The life of the institution dominates everything. This is one of the awful truths of incarceration, the fact that the horror and the struggle and the interest of your immediate life behind prison walls drives the ‘real world’ out of your head.”
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Prison, Prison Life
“It taught me among other things the relativity of freedom. Solitary confinement is rock bottom, it’s absolute unfreedom.’”
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Prison, Prison Life