Anthony Ray Hinton Quotes

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

I spent my first three weeks there on a wing with 21 murderers. I met some very evil people there but also some men who'd had no upbringing, no chance in life.

People always think about what prison is. What prison really is - it's not a physical challenge, it's mental.

As a prosecutor, I've been in prisons. I've had the opportunity to see what they're like in America.

It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.

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

I can tell you this on a stack of Bibles: prisons are archaic, brutal, unregenerative, overcrowded hell holes where the inmates are treated like animals with absolutely not one humane thought given to what they are going to do once they are released.

As governor, I will work to reform the practice of solitary confinement, which studies and medical and psychological associations say causes negative mental health effects on children, pregnant women and people living with mental illness.

Prison life, fortunately, I spent a lot of years, about 18 years with other prisoners, and, as I say, they enriched your soul.

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

Prison was tough on me. I saw people in prison that made me ashamed I was a human being. Some make Qaddafi and Idi Amin look like Sunday-school teachers.

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

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.

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.

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

I don't think women's prisons are environments for dance routines, and I don't think mass murder is humorous.

I've worked in the prison system for five years, and most of those folks in prison didn't have a direction.

The System is rigid, strict and hopeless solitary confinement, and I believe it, in its effects, to be cruel and wrong.

A considerable number of the prisoners fell even after a short confinement, into a semi-fatuous condition, from which it was next to impossible to arouse them, and others became violently insane; others, still, committed suicide, while those who stood the ordeal better were not generally reformed, and in most cases, did not recover sufficient mental activity to be of any subsequent service to the community.

I'll stay in my house and watch 'Lockup,' the prison show.

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.

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

I've taught in prison; I've counseled people... I've been arrested; I've been to the psychiatrist.

I spent five years of my youth in prison - some very bad prisons.