Malcolm X Quotes

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

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.

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

Jail is much easier on people who have nothing.

It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.

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

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.

When you go to jail, you are under the supervision of the state. You are housed with people who are criminals, so that becomes the expectation. People learn to become better criminals in jail and prison.

'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.

I was always shocked in prison because it's a scary place. It's not natural to lock that many people up like that, in such a tiny place. There's something disturbing about it.

I certainly didn't emerge from prison regretting anything I ever wrote, nor did I feel remorse for my crime in the least.

For one crime which is expiated in prison ten thousand are committed thoughtlessly by those who condemn.

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

Prisons do not disappear problems, they disappear human beings.

You should rejoice that you're in prison. Here you have time to think about your soul.

One of my younger homies, he went to jail, and some people came to me and were like, "Bail him out," and I said no. Why would I bail him out? He's going to prison. Let him sit and get some time served. You want to be crazy, but you don't want to go to jail. You want to shoot people, but you don't want to kill people. That's such a misleading thing.

It's cool because you get to see that some of these women are there because they should be. They're actually not good people to be in society. And then, other people are there because they just made a really retarded mistake.

I'm going to do the time and I am going to do it the right way

Rehabilitation is such a tiny part of prison life, and I think that has to change. The funny thing is that there's even bi-partisan agreement that it has to change, but the question is how. I don't know how.

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.

I'm playing somebody who is a recovering drug addict who got out of prison. It takes place in 2 weeks-the 1st 2 weeks I'm out of prison.

We are turning our prisons into living tombs, inhabited by doomed men living in everlasting blank despair.

Until you're grown-up they send you to reform school. After you're grown-up they send you to the penitentiary.