The day-to-day discomforts of prison life, combined with the big-picture realities of mass incarceration, do not add up to a party.
We can agree that keeping serious criminals in prison is an effective means of preserving public safety, but we must also recognize that the axiom of 'putting people in jail and throwing away the key' does not apply to all offenders universally and can actually be counterproductive.
As a Republican Party, we're going to have to have a conversation about it. But I think, ultimately, a majority of Republicans, like a majority of Americans, don't want to let violent felons out of prison.
I went to Rikers one time to do 'Third Watch,' and I remember thinking, 'Wow, this is a scary place.' We were using a section of the prison where half of it was still populated by inmates.
I have never articulated a specific number, but I think a nation as great as we are, that professes to favor freedom and liberty, that we would find a way to evidence that in our criminal justice system by achieving what we know we can achieve: a reduction in crime, a reduction in taxpayer expense, and a reduction in the prison population.
When people hear the term 'political prisoner,' especially on the Left, it becomes a kind of abstraction. Folks are aware of injustice, and they're aware that there are folks in prison who are in prison, you know, largely because of their activism.
Those revolutionaries who have, by chance, escaped the gallows should live and show to the world that they cannot only embrace gallows for the ideal but also bear the worst type of tortures in the dark, dingy prison cells.
Are there any good guys on 'Prison Break?' I suppose there might be. I can't honestly say whether I'm a good guy or a bad guy or I'm a good guy in wolf's clothing or sheep's clothing.
I was seized on the 8th of June, 1824, in consequence of the war with Bengal and, in company with Dr. Price, three Englishmen, one American, and one Greek, was thrown into the death prison at Ava, where we lay eleven months - nine months in three pairs and two months in five pairs of fetters.
The suffragettes realized the power of getting arrested and going to prison and harassing politicians and making a nuisance of themselves. It got them a lot of attention. What they never did was set out to endanger human life except for sacrificing themselves.
Most go to prison not on account of their irreducible uniqueness as people but because they are part of a marginalized sector of the population who never had a chance, who were slated for it early on.
A harrassed and dubious childhood under the hand of a well-meaning but barbarous mother's help from County Armagh led me to think of the North of Ireland as prison and the South as a land of escape.
I'm never going to get married again. Three strikes, you're out. I think if I would try to get married again in California, I have to go to prison, don't I? I think you only get three.
I'll stay in my house and watch 'Lockup,' the prison show.
It's very hard to be cut off in Glasgow because it's such a small city. You know, we have the highest rate of per-capita imprisonment, certainly in Britain, maybe in Europe. We have a very high murder rate here. So most people will know someone who's been to prison.
I used to regard genres as being embedded in cliches, and I always felt funny about the need we have to label things. But I'm happy to think of 'Starred Up' as a prison drama, although we tried to smuggle in some elements of family drama in there.
When you're in prison, you want to know that you were thought about.
The courage of the Syrian protesters is remarkable, for they face prison, torture, or death every time they lift a banner.
I stagnated in prison a long time, and I have wasted most of my life.
Studies have shown that inmate participation in education, vocational and job training, prison work skills development, drug abuse, mental health and other treatment programs, all reduce recidivism, significantly.
Having gone through what I went through, watching my family be torn to shreds and my children suffer immensely, I can't be the agent of doing that to someone else. I can't be the agent of causing someone to go to prison.
Prison makes an interesting context for so many different characters to come together. You get to see what lines get drawn between people.
After one has been in prison, it is the small things that one appreciates: being able to take a walk whenever one wants, going into a shop and buying a newspaper, speaking or choosing to remain silent. The simple act of being able to control one's person.
You can't be sent away to prison for life and feel OK about it.
On one of my last days at school, the headmaster said I would either end up in prison or become a millionaire. That was quite a startling prediction, but in some respects, he was right on both counts!
Even if I was in prison, I could be free in my head. I can adapt easily.
A children's author on a soapbox is not a pleasant sight but I have become drawn into issues, slightly unwillingly, relating to young people, literacy and youth justice: just look at the number of young people we have locked up in prison, and the uselessness of it.
I went to prison, I paid my bill.
I escaped my destiny. The odds were that I would end up in prison, but I didn't.
I don't want to go to prison... but there is nothing they can do to me that will make me stop this referendum.
One does not expect to be comfortable in prison. As a matter of fact, one's mental suffering is so much greater than any common physical distress that the latter is almost forgotten.
'Paris, Texas' is the first film that I've totally cared about, the first movie I totally wanted to do - and that after 27 years that I considered my prison term.
Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.
A black man of my generation born in the late 1960s is more than twice as likely to go to prison in his lifetime then a black man of my father's generation. I was born after the Voting Rights Act, after the Civil Rights Act, after the Fair Housing Act.
Custom is a prison, locked and barred by those who long ago were dust, the keys of which are in the keeping of the dead.
When you're going off to prison for the rest of your life, a lot of people do feel the need to explain themselves to all the people they have known.