Lee Tergesen Quotes

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.

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

All emphasis in American prisons is on punishment, retribution, and disparagement, and almost none is on rehabilitation.

Jails and prisons are designed to break human beings, to convert the population into specimens in a zoo—obedient to our keepers, but dangerous to each other.

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.

Every politician should go and spend time and visit prisons and jails. Because if you are choosing to exercise this kind of power over another person's life, there's a role for that, but you have to know the kind of power you are exercising.

After six prison commitments, at the end of those, I was more broken than when I went into the system.

Prisons are out of public sight, and most often out of mind. But the vast majority of prisoners will at some point leave jail and rejoin our communities, which is why what happens inside matters to us all.

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.

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

I believe, and I may be wrong, the system sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. Prison is supposed to rehabilitate, but they don't do that in a lot of cases.

Jails and prisons are the complement of schools; so many less as you have of the latter, so many more must you have of the former.

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

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

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.

Prisons are universities of the opposition.

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 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.

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.

Everybody knows that prison is not a good place for anyone, and nobody would feel proud to be there. But I'd like to mention that I was treated really well in there.

We must do better by offenders who are sent to prison to make them less likely to return.

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.

The prison systems in this country actually are exploitative and they are not in any way rehabilitative.

I wonder about prisoners. They're told, "You are free, you are innocent, you can go anywhere." I'm sure they usually feel nothing. They don't burst into tears or hysterics or joy or "I told you so." It's nothing. To be on the straight path isn't a bloody thing. It's just ordinary.