Florence King Quotes

How feeble is all language to describe the horrors we inflict upon these wretches, whom we mason up in the cells of our prisons, and condemn to perpetual solitude in the very heart of our population.

I don't believe that man was built to be put in a 5-by-7 for 30 years and have his sanity when he comes out if he doesn't find something to escape.

It was cold and clammy in the stone cell; they called it the "cooler," and used it to reduce the temperature of the violent and intractable. It was a trouble-saving device; they just left the man there and forgot him, and his own tormented mind did the rest.

I mean, The New York Times actually had an interesting case recently where they described a detainee who was afraid of the dark, and so he was purposely kept very much in the dark.

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.

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

I did a lot of research on what solitary confinement does to you, how you become acclimated to being surrounded by people again after being by yourself for such a long time. It's really a horrific thing. It's definitely worth considering it as torture. We're just not meant to be in solitary confinement.

Bradley Manning has been imprisoned without charge, under torture, which is what solitary confinement is.

Prison conditions in some parts of the world can be very poor, overcrowded and, in some cases, dangerous and sentences can be much tougher than in the U.K.

For being a bad student I was banished to the 'calaboose' - a bare cell with whitewashed walls and a bench to sit on. I liked it there, because I took along a sketch pad and drew incessantly I could have stayed there forever drawing without stopping

If they had wanted to punish me, they should have kept me in a communal apartment. Then I would have become a wreck.

It was better to be in a jail where you could bang the walls than in a jail you could not see.

To sit in solemn silence on a dull, dark dock in a pestilential prison with a life-long lock awaiting the sensation of a short, sharp shock from a cheap and chippy chopper on a big, black block.

Sometimes, we get numb to the fact that people get sent away. We don't see where they are; we say they are 'doing time,' and you really don't know what that is.

Most prisons in this country are in the middle of nowhere, which makes it much easier for us all to throw those people away. Out of sight, out of mind.

No one cares about you when you're in jail.

My father, David Gilbert, is in prison in New York. He is lucky that he has a single cell, not shared with another person. His cell is about eight feet by eight feet.

When you get locked up, you get locked out.

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.

There is nothing like the bootless solitude of those who are caged together.

People aren't wired to be alone. Even in the stressful population of prison, solitary confinement is still considered a cruel punishment.

I would like to say prison life at its very best and worst infinitely sucks.

I found solitary confinement the most forbidding aspect of prison life. There is no end and no beginning; there is only one's mind, which can begin to play tricks. Was that a dream or did it really happen? One begins to question everything.

On his eighteenth day in the tiger cage, Robert Stoney began to lose hope of emerging unscathed.

The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.