Michel Foucault Quotes

While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.

The prison life of the past looks in our own time like liberation itself.

They [prisons] are not designed to rehabilitate the - the inmate, though the, the public propaganda is that this is their function.

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.

Sixty per cent of people entering prison today are illiterate.

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

Think about how much it costs to incarcerate someone. Do we want them just sitting in prison, lifting weights, becoming violent and thinking about the next crime? Or do we want them having a little purpose in life and learning a skill?

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.

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.

The prison, above all others, should be the most human of institutions.

Prisons are the temples where devils learn to prey. Every time we turn the key we twist the knife of fate, because every time we cage a man we close him in with hate.

Over the course of my career, which is about 40 years, I've visited plenty of prisons and I know what they're like.

My buddy tells me a lot of interesting stories about what goes on in prison - it just makes my head spin about what they deal with on a day-to-day basis.

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

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

We have 1.8 million Americans behind bars today at Local, State and Federal level. In the federal system, which has doubled in the last ten years, over 110,000 people behind bars in the Federal system, probably two-thirds are there for drug related reason.

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.

The problem with Georgia prisons was the poor quality of the inmates.

I'll stay in my house and watch 'Lockup,' the prison show.

The system of mass incarceration depends almost entirely on the cooperation of those it seeks to control.

'Lockup,' inside America's supersize prisons on MSNBC, is one of my favorite shows. I get a lot of my inspiration for Blair Waldorf from that show.

Violent felons and people with mental health problems need to be rehabilitated.

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.

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.