Samira Wiley Quotes

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'm involved in the work around prison rights in general.

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.

It would be like the films I've seen where wardens would decide to be in a jail cell for a week, to get a sense of what it would be like to be a prisoner.

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.

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

I believe prisons have emerged as a new frontline in the fight against crime. The fact is, new technology and sophisticated approaches mean that prison walls alone are no longer effective in stopping crime – inside or outside of prison.

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

Prison life, fortunately, I spent a lot of years, about 18 years with other prisoners, and, as I say, they enriched your soul.

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.

Everything I did in the jails - chain gangs, everything - I haven't changed the policy. I did it, I stand by it, and I'm not going to change.

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

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

We need prisons because there are some hardcore criminals, but I never met a guy who has been in jail that came out with a smile on his face thinking, 'Right, that's it - now I am going to be good!'

Why would anyone expect Tyson to come out smarter? He went to prison for four years, not Princeton.

Dutch prisons are probably the most civilized you're going to find anywhere in the world.

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.

We spend $94,000 per prisoner [per year]. There is a tension between punishment and making people’s lives better and I don’t actually think that we have done the second part well. We put people in prison and expect them to come out

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.

Unless we address those that are leaving prisons, we can't begin to repair the damage of mass incarceration and make our communities whole and healthy once again.

Prisoners have benefited disproportionately from 'rights inflation' - the expansion of human rights into unforeseen nooks and crannies.

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.

I've been working in adult prisons and juvenile prisons for some time.