J. K. Simmons Quotes

If you're doing a prison show, HBO is the absolute best place in the world to be doing that because you're not going to have to do all that, you know, 'Prison Break' stuff where you can't really behave and speak like people do in a maximum-security prison.

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.

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.

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.

I knew no one who'd ever been in the public eye.

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

They're not supposed to show prison films in prison. Especially ones that are about escaping.

A duty to the public must be to stop prisoners reoffending through successful rehabilitation.

No one can say, 'I have dropped out - I am no longer in the system.' When you're in prison, you're even closer to the system: you feel it more, and you might be in there for whatever reason. You don't transform the system as an absolute thing.

Over the years, our federal prisons have become a breeding ground for radicalization. By allowing volunteers to enter the system without first having to undergo a comprehensive background check, some of the most vulnerable members of society have become susceptible to radicalization.

There are enough stories about my family. We have all been in the public eye.

I disappear from the public eye and get rediscovered quite often.

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

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.

Once I got in the public eye there was no going back.

The first visit I made to Australia was in 1996 when I was the prisons' minister and was looking at other countries' penal systems.

There were no artists in Ossining, which was the home of Sing Sing prison. Most of the parents of the guys I knew were guards there.

I tell inmates all the time, 'Don't complain about your grind. Do your time.'

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 feel sorry for people in the public eye getting eyed by the public.

When you're in prison, you want to know that you were thought about.

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

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.