Herman Melville Quotes

Imprisonment, as it exists today, is a worse crime than any of those committed by its victims.

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

All prisons that have existed in our society to date put people away as no human being should ever be put away.

I've wanted somehow to convey to you the sensations - the atmospheric pressure, you might say - of what it is to be seriously a long-term prisoner in an American prison.

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

It's a monstrous idea to put people in prison and keep them there.

If you ever meet someone who cannot understand why solitary confinement is considered punishment, you have met a misanthrope.

At Genoa, the word Liberty may be read over the front of the prisons and on the chains of the galley-slaves. This application of the device is good and just. It is indeed only malefactors of all estates who prevent the citizen from being free. In the country in which all such men were in the galleys, the most perfect liberty would be enjoyed.

Every prison that men build Is built with bricks of shame, And bound with bars lest Christ should see How men their brothers maim.

It was cold and clammy in the stone cell; they called it the "cooler," and used it to reduce the temperature of the violent and intractable. It was a trouble-saving device; they just left the man there and forgot him, and his own tormented mind did the rest.

Have not prisons - which kill all will and force of character in man, which enclose within their walls more vices than are met with on any other spot of the globe - always been universities of crime?

Prison … for the detention of persons and not for flagellating them or undermining their health.

Anyone and everyone eventually confesses under torture.

I don't know, it may be that poor people are the only ones who commit crimes, but I do know that they are the only ones who serve prison sentences.

Jail was terrible. It was a nightmare.

Bradley Manning has been imprisoned without charge, under torture, which is what solitary confinement is.

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.

Prison conditions in some parts of the world can be very poor, overcrowded and, in some cases, dangerous and sentences can be much tougher than in the U.K.

I prefer a prison full of criminals than a graveyard full of innocent people.

the prison system, inherently unjust and inhumane, is the ultimate expression of injustice and inhumanity in the society at large.

For being a bad student I was banished to the 'calaboose' - a bare cell with whitewashed walls and a bench to sit on. I liked it there, because I took along a sketch pad and drew incessantly I could have stayed there forever drawing without stopping

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

Prisons do not disappear social problems, they disappear human beings. Homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness, and illiteracy are only a few of the problems that disappear from public view when the human beings contending with them are relegated to cages.

As I view it, spending over two years in a cage is far worse than having your face pounded and dealing with a black eye for a week or two.

Liberty is a dearly bought commodity and prisons are factories where it is manufactured.