Richard Pryor Quotes

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

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

I get a lot of calls from families and people who have served time and they say, 'Thank you, Sheriff. I hate the tents.' That's music to my ears.

If I hadn't been in prison, maybe I wouldn't have gotten all those prison roles.

I don't know what goes on in prison. I've never been in trouble with the police in my life.

If you put a woman in prison for four years when she's young and make her pay her time in a horrible place and she wants to come out and work, and become a mother and be a contributor to society and pay taxes and you never give her that chance. There is something un-Canadian about that.

I know people who've gone to jail. It don't mean you stop loving them! They deservin' love just as much in there, and maybe they needin' it more.

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

After you have been incarcerated for so long, whatever story is told in the aftermath is beautiful.

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.

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.

Let them march all they want, as long as they continue to pay their taxes.

I am proud of being in a U.S. federal prison and surviving it.

And I did wonder - because it's now three years ago since I left prison - whether there would come a time when I would forget it, or it would be in the past as anything else might be - no, it's there every day of my life.

One day between takes on the 'Oz' set, I went into one of the cells and laid down and dozed off. When I woke up, I thought I was back in a federal pen. But I did my time, and today no one is more of a free man than Chuck Zito.

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.

We need to incorporate that age-old concept of redemption into the work that we do in the criminal justice system in California.

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

I'm not a fugitive anymore. Never will be in the future. After spending five years in jail, you learn your lesson. I never want to return there.

My family never missed a visit in eight months, ever. I cried coming out. I didn't cry coming in. There's a big difference. I believe that God put me there for a reason, Incarceration is serious.

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

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

As horrible as jail was, there were some first-rate guys in there.

If I’m ever released, I do the same again. Exactly the same.

A reform in the system of criminal jurisprudence, by which the death penalty shall no longer be inflicted; and by which, during that term, a portion of the prison employment shall be for, and the product thereof be faithfully paid over to, the support of the criminal’s family; and by which our so-called prisons shall be virtually transformed into vast reformatory workshops, from which the unfortunate may emerge to be useful members of society, instead of the alienated citizens they now are.