prison

Murderers _ serving life sentences _ were caring for their dying fellow inmates. Washing their bed-sore covered bodies, changing their diapers, holding their hands while they took their last breath. It was the other side of death, not the one at the end of a sudden muzzle flash, but the slow and wrenching kind, leaving plenty of time for hard reflection.

I was up really early. It was the day of my selection tests and interviews to become a Prison Officer. The recruitment process was an absolute joke ... Everyone could have travelled round the world seven fucking times before they hear[d] back from the Service's recruitment cowboys.

Pardon me, you ... love life? You who exclaim and sing over and over and dance it too: "i love you, life! Oh, I love you, life!" Do you? Well, go on, love it! Camp life -- love that too! It, too, is life!

The world is a prison for the believer and paradise for a non-believer.

This shit about being fearless before death ain't got no quality. How could you say you were fearless about leaving the party, even in stir__ven franks and rice taste good when you're hungry, even an iron bar feels good to touch, it feels good to sleep. It's like a party even in maximum security and who wants to walk out of a party into something that nobody knows anything at all about?

Prison is a process, a succession of imprisonments. At first it operates only on a physical level, restricting your movement. Later, it extends to the psychological plane, encompassing your very perception. You come to exclude all thoughts, all visions of the free world.

Merry Christmas me bollocks. The words of the Pogues's 'Fairytale of New York' also came to mind: surrounded by scumbags and maggots, I prayed God it would be my last in Los Teques.

Prison would kill him. Not neatly or cleanly or quickly, It would kill him with ten thousand days of gray, each taking a bite of his sanity until all that remained was huddled terror with the body of a man wrapped around it.

I began to notice something strange about the nature of incarceration; in particular, its imposition on the minds and bodies of the imprisoned, promoting a number of inmates to take personal responsibility for a system of failure beyond their control__ system built on hiding in plain sight the institutional, historical, and material limits of personal choice_.Taking on the failures of a system without critically examining the limits of personal choice often led a number of cellmates to conflate their sense of responsibility with issues beyond their control.--Kalaniopua Young, __rom a Native Trans Daughter

Handcuffs weigh much more than gravestones.(from "Gratitude")

The primary obligation of any prisoner is to escape. Whether that means actually leaving or simply figuring out a way to handle things so you don't go crazy is up to you.

You did it! You are free!!!!!!!!

Cage an eagle and it will bite at the wires, be they ofiron or of gold.

Once the cons were in the cell, they__ pull razors or homemade daggers out and rob the YOs of their trainers, leather jackets or jewellery. You couldn__ placate them; it would be akin to expecting not to be bitten from a Rhodesian Ridgeback whilst petting it! Bar L was full of rough, colourful and out-of-control junkies who wouldn__ think twice about stabbing you or slashing you just to get what you had on your feet to pay for their next hit of smack.

When a friend of mine boasted about living in a gated community, I thought he meant Folsom, and I wondered whether he knew Charles Manson.

Kaladin frowned. __ait. Are you wearing cologne? In prison?___ell, there was no need to be barbaric, just because I was incarcerated.___torms, you__e spoiled,_ Kaladin said, smiling.____ refined, you insolent farmer,_ Adolin said. Then he grinned. __esides, I__l have you know that I had to use cold water for my baths while here.___oor boy.

To Cassidy, the panopticon wasn't a metaphor. It was the greatest failing on everything she was, a prison she had built for herself out of an inability to appear anything less than perfect. And so she ghosted on, in relentless pursuit of escape, not from society, but from herself. She would always be confined by what everyone expected of her because she was too afraid and too unwilling to correct our imperfect imaginings.

Don't promote yourself as a country of constitutionality and compassion if you honestly believe that putting people in prison and treating them like animals is justified. Stop all the hype that we live in a free and democratic society. I used to ramble on about the same stuff. But now__re we really a country that believes in fairness and compassion? Are we really a country that treats people fairly? I've met good men__es, good men__n prison who made mistakes out of stupidity or ignorance, greed, or just bad judgment, but they did not need to be sent to prison to be punished; eighteen months for catching too many fish; two years for inflating income on a mortgage application; three months for selling a whale's tooth on eBay; fifteen years for a first-time nonviolent drug conspiracy in which no drugs were found or seized. There are thousands of people like these in our prisons today, costing American taxpayers billions of dollars when these individuals could be punished in smarter, alternative ways. Our courts are overpunishing decent people who make mistakes, and our prisons have no rewards or incentives for good behavior. In this alone criminal justice and prison systems contradict their own mission statements (244).