Prison Guards Quotes

I never fully understood it till my friend Professor Tolkien asked me the very simple question, 'What class of men would you expect to be most preoccupied with, and hostile to, the idea of escape?' and gave the obvious answer: jailers.

Nothing corrupts a man so much as being an arm of the law and making men suffer.

We might think of prisons as miniature socialist societies, where government is in full control. For that reason, they are a complete failure for everyone but those who get the contracts to build the jails and those who work in them.… In prison, nothing takes place outside the government's purview. The people therein are wholly and completely controlled by state managers, which means that they have no value. And yet it is a place of monstrous chaos, abuse, and corruption. Is it any wonder that people coming out of prison are no better off than before they went in, and are often worse, and scarred for life?

In prison, you're issued a number of sanitary pads per month. And many times, even when you're issued a number of sanitary pads, the guards will just come in and rip your room apart, rip your locker apart and take them.

It is important to remember that government interference always means either violent action or the threat of such action. Government is in the last resort the employment of armed men, of policemen, gendarmes, soldiers, prison guards, and hangmen. The essential feature of government is the enforcement of its decrees by beating, killing, and imprisoning. Those who are asking for more government interference are asking ultimately for more compulsion and less freedom.

We rightly rehearse the crimes of Nazism almost daily. We teach them to our children as ultimate historical and moral lessons. And we bear witness to every victim. We are almost silent on the crimes of Communism. So the bodies lie among us unnoticed everywhere. We insisted upon denazification and we excoriated those who tempered it in the name of new or emerging political realities. There never was nor will be a similar decommunization, though the slaughter of innocents was exponentially greater, though those who signed the orders and ran the camps remain. In the case of Nazism, we hunt down 90 year old prison guards because the bones cry out for justice, rightly so. In the case of Communism, however, we insisted on, “no witch hunts” as the New York Times editorially demanded when Lithuania thought about accountability in 1990.

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.

The dementors send their love, Potter!

The prison guards are capable of committing daily atrocities and obscenities, smiling the smile of the angels all the while.

Governmental power is the faculty to beat into submission all those who would dare to disobey the orders issued by the authorities. … Every governmental action is backed by constables, prison guards, and executioners. However beneficial a governmental action may appear, it is ultimately made possible only by the government's power to compel its subjects to do what many of them would not do if they were not threatened by the police and the penal courts.

That there is also freedom in captivity, only a prisoner can claim. Coming from a prison guard, this statement would be blasphemy.

You don't need a lot of credentials to be prison guard in a federal prison. And, you know, you give them a set of keys and a weapon, and they're in power.

The fastest growing occupation in the private sector is security guards. The fastest growing occupation in the public sector is prison guards. (1992)

Prison guard unions have become the powerful political forces in some states, particularly California.

The war on drugs is a war on Americans…. We criminalize what Black people do and medicalize what white people do … The money that used to be paid to college professors now goes to prison guards.

I didn't spend a lot of time with prison guards, but my father was an assistant district attorney for a long time so I was always hearing stories about prisoners and prison guards.