City Of Inmates Quotes

A proverb in the Old Testament states: 'He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty; and he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city'. It is when we become angry that we get into trouble. The road rage that affects our highways is a hateful expression of anger. I dare say that most of the inmates of our prisons are there because they did something when they were angry. In their wrath they swore, they lost control of themselves, and terrible things followed, even murder. There were moments of offense followed by years of regret. . . . So many of us make a great fuss of matters of small consequence. We are so easily offended. Happy is the man who can brush aside the offending remarks of another and go on his way.

So are you an inmate or a rubbernecker?" she asks. "Rubbernecker," I answer without hesitation. "You?" "I'm a screw. Or on staff, anyway. Used to be an inmate. Repeat offender. Crimes against my body. Puking sickness followed by heroin, which led to more puking sickness." I'd be surprised at her forthrightness, but that's addicts for you. The twelve steps crack 'em open and then they can't shut up.

Money bail is ruining the lives of literally millions of poor people and costing the country unnecessary billions of dollars in incarceration costs every year. Local jail populations grew by 19.8 percent just between 2000 and 2014, with pretrial detention accounting for 95 percent of that growth. Just as one example, but typical of big cities around the country, is Philadelphia, where the cost of running the jails is $110 to $120 per inmate per day. The single feature shared by almost every defendant in pretrial detention is that they are poor. Rich people make bail; poor people don't. Regardless of actual guilt or innocence, poor people are criminalized for their inability to buy their way out of jail.

Also in America, the Redemptorist priest and founder of the Paulist order, Fr. Isaac Hecker, was a great admirer of St. Catherine, seeing in her the perfect foil to those who claimed that Catholicism promotes a mechanical piety or fosters a sanctity unconcerned with the real needs of suffering humanity in society. To the latter charge he replied forcefully: "Read the life of St. Catherine, and in imagination fancy her in the city hospital of Genoa, charged not only with the supervision and responsibility of its finances, but also overseeing the care of its sick inmates, taking an active, personal part in its duties as one of its nurses, and conducting the whole establishment with strict economy, perfect order, and the tenderest care and love!

In 1984, a group of former Holmesburg prisoners sued the University of Pennsylvania and the city of Philadelphia. Nearly all of the men were African Americans, as were most of the inmates used in all the experiments at the prison.

Lunches provided by New York City via the U.S. government, the same meals that prison inmates eat—that’s what our Social Studies teacher Mr. DiMarco told us.

Violence, not stricter drug sentences, drove mass incarceration. New York is proof. For ten years after Governor Nelson Rockefeller and the state legislature increased penalties for drug use beginning in 1973, the number of people in prison for drugs hardly changed. Then, in 1984, the number of people incarcerated for drug crimes started to rise sharply due to violence associated with the crack epidemic. More than a decade later, in 1997, total inmates in New York prisons for drug offenses peaked and began their long decline, mostly because of a reduction in violence. It was only in 2004 and again in 2009 that the state legislature reduced penalties, and the declining rate of incarceration for drug crimes didn’t change after those two years.

We found ourselves in a lovers’ arrangement common in cities, when you see each other after midnight, once a week or so, sometimes dinner if he felt up for a date. I wanted more, but he had just gotten free of a long relationship, and I’d never been in one. We dated other people. I gravitated to people who reminded me of him, quiet, reserved, people who moved with diligence and discipline in their art. Masculine, but soft. When I couldn’t bear our arrangement, I cut myself off. But I wanted to smell him. I traced his scent back to the source, the Brooklyn Bangladeshi-owned oil shop Madina on Atlantic Avenue, an institution. Named for one of the two holy cities in Islam, the word al-Madina simply means the city, and the shop’s visitors include Black and Muslim entrepreneurs, fragrance aficionados, folks who want to smell good for cheap, imams who sell the oils to the prison commissary, making perfumes available to inmates. I would purchase five-dollar roll-on bottles of oil to smell him in those periods we were off-again.

But a closer look at the data reveals that just 3.7 percent of state prisoners are there for nonviolent drug possession, and that 14.1 percent of state prisoners are locked up for any nonviolent drug offense. Forty-seven percent of inmates in federal prisons are in for nonviolent drug convictions, but there are just 172,000 people in federal prisons and 1.3 million in state prisons.7 Over half of all prisoners in state prisons are there for violent offenses like murder, rape, and robbery.8

I am with you, rafēgh (comrade) By Siavash Kasrai Translation: Darya Saudade --- I am with you, rafēgh (comrade), in wherever you are and struggle. I am your neighbor when, beside the window in the evening's gaze, you hum the people’s anthem to yourself. I walk in step with you when, devoted to anxiety and eagerness, you hand out a nightly leaflet to every passerby in the alley, with the ring of every word, you awaken a heart, a city, a whole homeland. I am with you when among the people, like a restless fish in water, you slide and come and seek, and warn the sleeping of the flood coming. I work alongside you when the body is worn out from work, but, in the fields, the factories, you keep working, you keep working. I am your fellow-sufferer when with the caress of your hands you beckon the child to patience, as if awakening a bud from its slumber I am your fellow inmate when you fill the dragging moments with forgotten memories in the corner of your confinement or in the fever of torture and the throes of anguish. No, my soulmate, my comrade, no, I won’t leave you alone, when at an unknown dawn you sacrifice your life for ideals and love. I am with you, rafēgh, I am with you, rafēgh, In wherever I am and struggle. In wherever you are and struggle.

In the mid-1990s, New York City was spending $58,000 annually per adult inmate and $70,000 for each juvenile at Rikers.[6] In 2013, the annual cost per inmate was $167,000.[7] Over the last two decades this amounts to eight to ten times what the city spends on each child in its public schools.

The prisoners stand on the other side, three of whom require their own cages. He hands out the Eucharist through a sort of mail slot in the grate. They have slots in each cage, he tells me, and when they do the sign of peace, they can reach out to each other. One time an inmate held up his fingertip to a tiny hole in the grate. Fr. Williams placed his hand against the grate as well. “It really sums up the whole thing. You have this human being reaching through a cage to touch another human being within a bigger cage, within a prison.

I was surprised to learn that Savannah’s design was enlightened in more ways than one. James Oglethorpe, who founded Georgia and drew up the plan for Savannah, was very progressive. Georgia was founded to house relocated inmates—debtors released thanks to Oglethorpe’s push for prison reform in England—and under his watch, which lasted until 1742, slavery was prohibited in Georgia. So, for that matter, was aristocracy. Oglethorpe’s vision of social equity extended to his layout for Savannah. By serving as shared public space, the now-famous squares fostered community engagement and participation in city affairs.