Anthony Ray Hinton Quotes

Chained in a cell, got my own private hell. Preacher crucifies me, warden wants to fry me.

When you're in prison, and we're left to our own devices, you're stripped of everything, and you really get to see who these people are, the good and the bad.

Jail was terrible. It was a nightmare.

To sit in solemn silence on a dull, dark dock in a pestilential prison with a life-long lock awaiting the sensation of a short, sharp shock from a cheap and chippy chopper on a big, black block.

I get a lot of letters from prisoners. They say things you can't imagine.

The closest thing to hell on earth is prison. It's the worst experience I've ever had in my life. Besides death.

I will say that the prison regime is rather a good one for a writer because you have plenty of time to write.

If you believe in God, believe in Death Row East.

We have real cliched ideas of what prison life is like. It is not a happy place. It's a desperate, sad situation.

By and large, prisons are survivable, though hope is indeed what you need least upon entering here; a lump of sugar would be more useful.

I don't know what my Death Row meal would be. I'm surprised that people can even eat when they're on Death Row.

It was really tough being in jail. It doesn't get much lower. You're in a filthy room. The food is terrible, and you're surrounded by people who have done all types of crazy crimes. You have nothing that belongs to you, not even your own underwear. It's just terrible.

My father, David Gilbert, is in prison in New York. He is lucky that he has a single cell, not shared with another person. His cell is about eight feet by eight feet.

Death row was the only place where I never witnessed racism. We all went to bed with a death sentence on our heads and woke up that way. We had to become each other's support system.

I was always shocked in prison because it's a scary place. It's not natural to lock that many people up like that, in such a tiny place. There's something disturbing about it.

When the prisoner is brought down from Death Row he steps from the elevator directly into a "holding" room that adjoins the witness room. There are two cells in this "holding" room, two, in case it's a double execution. They're ordinary cells, just like this one, and the prisoner spends his last night there before his execu­tion in the morning, reading, listening to the radio, playing cards with the guards.

The world is itself but a larger prison, out of which some are daily selected for execution.

Imprisonment is as irrevocable as death.

Being on death row has taken so much from me as a human being.

In death row every rule in society is flipped.

The only thing worse than working acting in an airplane is working in a prison - they're cold, and the clanging and the noise, it just gets under your skin after a week.

I relate to any prison movie, as long as it has some authenticity.

I would like to say prison life at its very best and worst infinitely sucks.

If I were asked to chose between execution and life in prison I would, of course, chose the latter. It's better to live somehow than not at all.

I had one warden tell me since I've been out, and I visited an inmate in prison right here in New York, Warden Fay up at Green Haven. I visited an inmate in prison and he told me that he didn't want anybody in there trying to spread this religion.