Mario Vargas Llosa Quotes

What do people have against convicts? Is living together in the pen of freedom, where young people engage in mutual psychology, any more beautiful?

Only to those who have been in prison does freedom have such great meaning.

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.

Prison is where you promise yourself the right to live.

I am jailed, with around 200 other inmates, in a wide hall that looks like a warehouse.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

You know how some people complain about the way carriage horses are treated? That they are in a small stall? That is mistreatment. In a holding cell, you get very bored. You have no newspapers, you have no anything.

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

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

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.

Jail is much easier on people who have nothing.

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.

Prison … for the detention of persons and not for flagellating them or undermining their health.

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.

No penal or political system which multiplies the population of the prisons at the rate of 10 per cent every year will solve a problem which is growing to be more and more of a danger to the social and moral life of the nation.

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

Prison is essentially a shortage of space made up for by a surplus of time; to an inmate, both are palpable.