Lester Maddox Quotes

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 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 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.

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.

Prisons are universities of the opposition.

There's definitely a way to fix the prison system. First of all, you gotta get a rehabilitation center in prisons, that every inmate must go through.

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.

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

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.

The prison is the state writ small.

I have never understood the liberal assumption that if there were justice in the world, there would be fewer rather than more prisoners.

Ninety per cent of prison riots start from stupid wardens.

Too many states spend more money on prisons than on higher education.

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.

The prison system in Norway is fairly civilized, by world standards, and so are the prisoners and the guards.

Everybody knows that prison is not a good place for anyone, and nobody would feel proud to be there. But I'd like to mention that I was treated really well in there.

I think most of us are far removed from what goes on in our jails and the system. When I started working on 'Lucknow Central,' it was the first time I gave it some thought.

Then once you get people locked up, it's an incredibly inhuman system.

Since the late 1970's, the main focus of prisons has been punishment, not rehabilitation. It's hard to believe, but you would be hard-pressed to find a meaningful violence-prevention class in a federal or state penitentiary. And 'we the people' are footing the bill to keep these folks imprisoned. It costs on average $46,000 a year to keep an adult incarcerated in California and about the same for New York State.

Most of us think prison is a place where bad people go - which is what I thought for a long time - until you really start to look inside the system and you see, this is not right.

'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.

Prisons are out of public sight, and most often out of mind. But the vast majority of prisoners will at some point leave jail and rejoin our communities, which is why what happens inside matters to us all.

A feeling of self worth is the best accomplishment we can foster in our prisons.

People bring up Willie Horton or some other political bombshell in the past, but what they're not being intellectually honest about is if we do not work on early release, if we do not rehabilitate 95 percent of the people who go into the prison system and come out, far more innocent people are going to be harmed.