Alan Alda Quotes

A lot of guys in jail tattoo their hands.

I have done prison time for 13 years without any conviction.

Prison makes an interesting context for so many different characters to come together. You get to see what lines get drawn between people.

People in general have a preconceived idea of what prison is, from seeing documentaries or whatever.

I came out even with all the struggles I endured on Rikers Island.

Prisons are fascinating places, especially when the inmates are educated white-collar types.

I've definitely become more aware of the penal system and more aware of what life could be like inside a prison.

Going to prison, for me, was like seeing my death before it happened.

I don’t see how the Justice Department thinks they have a system that works when 50 percent of the [appeals] cases get sent back for fixing…. How does that happen? How in God’s name does that happen? Here in America. How many more cases of wrongful conviction before we can agree that the system … is broken.

… when it is shown to us that a person is serving an illegal sentence our obligation is to direct that proper steps be taken to correct the wrong done, without regard to the character of a particular defendant or to the possible effect on others who might also want to challenge the legality of their sentences as they have the right to do 'at any time' under Rule 35. If it has any relevance at all, the fact that there may be other prisoners in this country's jails serving illegal sentences would seem to me to make it all the more imperative that we grant appropriate relief in this case rather than search for some obviously dubious excuse to deny this petitioner's claim..

The fact that the United States, with less than 5 percent of the world's population incarcerates 25% of the world's prisoners is largly due to manditory minimum sentences.

The first thing I did that was at all in the public eye, other than on stage, was 'Oz,' in which I played the head of the Aryan Brotherhood in a maximum-security prison.

I just spent 11 and a half months in a maximum-security jail, got shot five times, and was wrongly convicted of a crime I didn't commit.

There were no artists in Ossining, which was the home of Sing Sing prison. Most of the parents of the guys I knew were guards there.

To be on the other side of the law-and-order machine in this country is awful. It is dehumanizing and degrading and deforming. It fills you with a helpless rage because, once there, you can only make things worse for yourself by speaking up.

I been in jail twice. The first time was reform school: they got me for carrying burglar's tools, something like that. The morals charge was a frame-up.

I was not aware of a ton of the stuff that was being said about me out in the world since I wasn't able to get British or American headlines from my prison cell in Perugia. But I was aware that in the courtroom, I was being called a succubus, a man-eater, 'Foxy Knoxy.'

The first thing I organized around was the Central Park Five case for the young men who were accused. We talked about the unfair misrepresentation of these young teenagers in the media. I've been fighting back against Donald Trump for a long time.

One of the things I love about 'Orange' is I think we bring to light a lot of topics that, particularly in terms of prison, might go untalked about.

Like you, I have been disgraced about what I've seen on TV that took place in prison.

The prison life of the past looks in our own time like liberation itself.

When you're in prison, there's no hiding. These women are not hiding behind towels and shower curtains. They go to the bathroom with no doors on the stalls. It would actually look weird, if these women were hiding.

Almost makes you want to go to jail out here, doesn't it?

Judicial execution can never cancel or remove the atrocity it seeks to punish; it can only add a second atrocity to the original one ... So long as one sees killing as wrong there is no need to waste time with the deterrent argument, since it would be nonsense to try to prevent a theoretical evil in the future by perpetrating an actual one in the present.

Too long have we been silent under unjust and unholy charges; we cannot expect to have them removed until we disprove them through ourselves.