Prison does strange things to men. Although its purpose is to break the free spirit of a man, in many cases it just adds fuel to the fire that has never been and will never be extinguished.

Jails and prisons are designed to break human beings, to convert the population into specimens in a zoo - obedient to our keepers, but dangerous to each other. In response, imprisoned men and women will invent and continually invoke various and sundry defenses. Consequently, two layers of existence can be encountered within almost every jail or prison. The first layer consists of the routines and behavior prescribed by the governing penal hierarchy. The second layer is the prisoner culture itself: the rules and standards of behavior that come from and are defined by the captives in order to shield themselves from the open or covert terror designed to break their spirits.

Prison kills your spirit, straight up. It kills your spirit. There is no creativity, there's none of that.

A central aspect of punishment by imprisonment is that most opportunities for diversion are denied the prisoner. And, there being few other means for protecting oneself against angst, prisoners are for the most part constantly on the brink of utter despair. Any measures he can find to stave off this despair are justified as an attempt to preserve life itself; for the moment he experiences his soul alone in the universe, there is nothing else to see but the categorical impossibility of existence.

Prison is a society within a society. It’s a reflection of life in the streets. The jargon may be different, but we think and feel the same as on the streets and we recreate it in prison.

I am convinced that imprisonment is a way of pretending to solve the problem of crime. It does nothing for the victims of crime, but perpetuates the idea of retribution, thus maintaining the endless cycle of violence in our culture. It is a cruel and useless substitute for the elimination of those conditions — poverty, unemployment, homelessness, desperation, racism, greed — which are at the root of most punished crime. The crimes of the rich and powerful go mostly unpunished.

It must surely be a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit that even a small number of those men and women in the hell of the prison system survive it and hold on to their humanity.

Prisons are compact duplicates of the Black community, in that many of the same negative and destructive elements that are allowed to exist in our community and cause crime, especially drugs, are in poison in a more blatant and concentrated form To call such places "correctional" or "rehabilitative" institutions is a gross misnomer. Death camps are more like it. These prisons do not exist to punish everyone equally, but to protect the existing Capitalist system from you and I, the poor and working class.

The formula for prison is a lack of space counterbalanced by a surplus of time. This is what really bothers you, that you can't win. Prison is lack of alternatives, and the telescopic predictability of the future is what drives you crazy.

Prisons, along with the police, are the twin pillars of . They are used by the ruling elites to keep those discarded by and fearful, intimidated and neutralized. Break the and the bonds of the and the ruling elites will stand naked before us. And this is why the reigning oligarchs, despite gaslighting us with promises of reform, have no intention of weakening the two principle institutions that keep those they have betrayed in bondage and themselves in power.

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

Prison is an expensive way of making bad people worse.

Prison is where you promise yourself the right to live.

Let us be clear. Prison works. It ensures that we are protected from murderers, muggers and rapists, and it makes many who are tempted to commit crime think twice.

Prisons are needed only to provide the illusion that courts and police are effective. They’re a kind of job insurance.