Gregory Corso Quotes

I've never been incarcerated; I don't deal with these things on a day-to-day basis in my own personal life, but I have family members that do. I have friends that do. I have people in the city that I live in, Philadelphia, that are dealing with this on a daily basis.

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.

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.

First of all, I didn't suggest that we should simply get rid of all prisons.

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

Unfortunately, the elimination of incentives such as parole, good time credits and funding for college courses, means that fewer inmates participate in and excel in literacy, education, treatment and other development programs.

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.

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

Well I certainly have learned and I hope I'm moving on and certainly two years of prison was a terrible punishment.

The second time I went to jail, I was like, 'Okay, this is not the move.'

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.

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.

The Federal prison population has increased more than 7-fold over the past 20 years.

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

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!'

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

Incarcerating non-violent offenders in the same population as more dangerous criminals has the effect of inculcating the former into a culture of criminality common among the latter, making them more of a risk to public safety upon release than when they originally went in.

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.

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

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

At the age of 46, in my sixth prison term, it was the second prison I was in - California Rehabilitation Center. The California Civil Education program kind of opened up all of the experiences that that I had dealt with in my life, that I had experienced.

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

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

We've been addicted to incarceration as a primary response for decades, whether or not it's a good use of resources, whether or not it's humane, whether or not it is effective at keeping us safe, rehabilitating or healing victims.