Incarceration Experience Quotes

Prison was a blessing. Going to prison was the greatest thing that happened to me. It showed me that I wasn't infallible. It showed me that I was just human. It showed me that I can be back with my ghetto brothers I grew up with and have a good time. It taught me to cool out. It taught me patience. It taught me that I didn't ever want to lose my freedom. It taught me that drugs bring on the devil. It taught me to grow up.

I spent two months in a jail once. In a Mexican border town.

I attended college in prison. I was in jail, so there ain't no going to no classes. They have programs in certain facilities where you can earn good time, and then you get time taken off your sentence. But as far as going to classes, it's not like that. You study, and then an administrator gives you a test. I got a Master's in psychology.

Being arrested that also changed everything for me because I was suddenly seeing America from a different perspective all together. I did a couple of weeks in a county jail.

Inside the walls of a prison my body may be, but my Lord has set my soul free.

I only wrote one song in jail. But I'm writing new album - you're going to feel the entire 11 months of what I went through on this album. I'm venting my anger.

I really don't pay attention to the outside world when I'm incarcerated, because being in prison is like being in a different world. So I don't pay attention to what's going on outside of jail, because it's all beyond my control.

Are there other people who, when watching a documentary set in a prison, secretly think, as I have, 'Wish I had all that time to read'?

Convicts are the best audience I ever played for.

To be on the other side of the law-and-order machine in this country is awful. It is dehumanizing and degrading and deforming. It fills you with a helpless rage because, once there, you can only make things worse for yourself by speaking up.

The inmates and prisoners, I found they were my kind, and it was there inside the bars I found my peace of mind.

I would have been content with still playing Inmate #1. I worked on every prison movie made, from 1985 to 1991. I would go from movie to movie to movie.

I think the years I have spent in prison have been the most formative and important in my life because of the discipline, the sensations, but chiefly the opportunity to think clearly, to try to understand things.

During the '80s I wrote Memoirs from the Women's Prison. This is one of my most important books. It came out in Arabic in '83. About my experience in prison.

Bless you prison, bless you for being in my life. For there, lying upon the rotting prison straw, I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul.

They spent the night in jail, where their progressive views on gay marriage served them well.

Put your trust in the Lord....your ass belongs to me. Welcome to Shawshank.

Prison is not a mere physical horror. It is using a pickaxe to no purpose that makes a prison.

In durance vile 1here must I wake and weep, And all my frowsy couch in sorrow steep.

Incarceration didn't change me. In many ways, incarceration galvanized me. The totality of the experience helped me.

I have had much experience with the unclean and uncivilized in the recent past. Shall I tell you what I discovered? I am not the state of my feet. I am not the dirt on my hands or the hygiene of my private parts. If I were these things, I would not have been at liberty to pray at any time since my arrest. But I did pray, because I am not these things. In the end, I am not even myself. I am a string of bones speaking the word God.

Prison itself is a tremendous education in the need for patience and perseverance. It is above all a test of one's commitment.

I ain't never been in no cell that had a phone in it. Can I stay for a while? I ordered some pizza.

She had read a wonderful play about a man who scratched on the wall of his cell and she had felt that was true of life — one scratched on the wall.