David Gauke Quotes

When you're in prison, the progress of the outside world doesn't necessarily translate inside prison walls. You don't have any rights; it just doesn't progress along the same timeline.

A friend of mine is chief of staff at a big prison in Georgia. Along with giving me a tour of the prison, she allowed me to meet inmates.

There's definitely a way to fix the prison system. First of all, you gotta get a rehabilitation center in prisons, that every inmate must go through.

I know what it's like to be ignored, and I think that is the big problem about the prison system: These people are being thrown away. There is no sense of rehabilitation. In some places, they are trying to do things. But, in most cases, it's a holding cell.

I'm involved in the work around prison rights in general.

Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.

Why would anyone expect Tyson to come out smarter? He went to prison for four years, not Princeton.

We spend $94,000 per prisoner [per year]. There is a tension between punishment and making people’s lives better and I don’t actually think that we have done the second part well. We put people in prison and expect them to come out

I grew up in Huntsville, which is a main prison town. It's crazy. The conditions are so bad in prison, often, for the inmates.

The first visit I made to Australia was in 1996 when I was the prisons' minister and was looking at other countries' penal systems.

A duty to the public must be to stop prisoners reoffending through successful rehabilitation.

I don't often do a lot of that kind of research, but when it's something specific like 'Oz' - which I fortunately did not have a lot of experience with - I will. I read 'The Hot House,' about being on the inside at Leavenworth prison.

No one can say, 'I have dropped out - I am no longer in the system.' When you're in prison, you're even closer to the system: you feel it more, and you might be in there for whatever reason. You don't transform the system as an absolute thing.

I don't even think jail helps Gucci Mane. It clearly doesn't.

Unless we address those that are leaving prisons, we can't begin to repair the damage of mass incarceration and make our communities whole and healthy once again.

People bring up Willie Horton or some other political bombshell in the past, but what they're not being intellectually honest about is if we do not work on early release, if we do not rehabilitate 95 percent of the people who go into the prison system and come out, far more innocent people are going to be harmed.

I've been working in adult prisons and juvenile prisons for some time.

A lot of the best of what's come from working on 'Orange Is the New Black' is working with the Women's Prison Association and kind of getting to see firsthand what they do for incarcerated women.

As soon as I ended up being incarcerated, I said, you know, this is not the life for me.

I used to teach acting in a maximum security men's prison. I worked with guys with the most dysfunctional behavior problems. I probably learned more there than from my prestigious theater degree.

Without turning prison life into something more meaningful, prisoners are more likely to reoffend.

It would be like the films I've seen where wardens would decide to be in a jail cell for a week, to get a sense of what it would be like to be a prisoner.

We need prisons because there are some hardcore criminals, but I never met a guy who has been in jail that came out with a smile on his face thinking, 'Right, that's it - now I am going to be good!'

The way to reform has always led through prison.

Prisons are universities of the opposition.