Jail Inmates Quotes

The greater ignorance towards a country is not ignoring what its politicians have to say, it is ignoring what the inmates in its prisons have to say.

Jealousy—at least as far as he understood it from his dream—was the most hopeless prison in the world. Jealousy was not a place he was forced into by someone else, but a jail in which the inmate entered voluntarily, locked the door, and threw away the key. And not another soul in the world knew he was locked inside. Of course if he wanted to escape he could do so. The prison, was after all, his own heart. But he couldn't make that decision. His heart was as hard as a stone wall. This was the very essence of jealousy.

Today, over 50 percent of prison and jail inmates in the United States have a diagnosed mental illness, a rate nearly five times greater than that of the general adult population.

I frowned. Evidently, Sangris wasn't a cat who could shape-shift. It was more difficult than that. He was a nothing who occasionally pretended to be a cat. "I wish I could know what it's like for myself, that's all," I said. I felt rather the way a jail inmate would if a bird flew up and shouted through her window bars: This freedom thing? Yeah, not so great.

There is no greater threat to a free and democratic nation than a government that fails to protect its citizen’s freedom and liberty as aggressively as it pursues justice.

American citizens should not lose their constitutional rights because they lack the money to pay for them.

Jealousy was not a place he was forced into by someone else, but a jail in which the inmate entered voluntarily, locked the door, and threw away the key.

No one should ever be wrongfully deprived of their rights to liberty and freedom without just cause, yet in the past 25 years alone thousands of people have been wrongfully convicted and sentenced to tens of thousands of years in prison.

Norway, Iceland, Australia, Canada, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, Japan, the Netherlands, Denmark, and the United Kingdom are among the least religious societies on [E]arth. According to the United Nations' Human Development Report (2005) they are also the healthiest, as indicated by life expectancy, adult literacy, per capita income, educational attainment, gender equality, homicide rate, and infant mortality. Insofar as there is a crime problem in Western Europe, it is largely the product of immigration. Seventy percent of the inmates of France's jails, for instance, are Muslim. The Muslims of Western Europe are generally not atheists. Conversely, the fifty nations now ranked lowest in terms of the United Nations' [H]uman [D]evelopment [I]ndex are unwaveringly religious. Other analyses paint the same picture: the United States is unique among wealthy democracies in its level of religious adherence; it is also uniquely beleaguered by high rates of homicide, abortion, teen pregnancy, sexually transmitted disease, and infant mortality. The same comparison holds true within the United States itself: Southern and Midwestern states, characterized by the highest levels of religious literalism, are especially plagued by the above indicators of societal dysfunction, while the comparatively secular states of the Northeast conform to European norms.

In a free and democratic society such as ours, justice should not eternally abrogate one’s rights to freedom and liberty, except in the most extreme cases.

Today, over 50 percent of prison and jail inmates in the United States have a diagnosed mental illness, a rate nearly five times greater than that of the general adult population.

But where will this mania for entertainment end? What will people do when they get tired of television? When they get tired of movies? We already know the answer—they go into participatory activities: sports, theme parks, amusement rides, roller coasters. Structured fun, planned thrills. And what will they do when they tire of theme parks and planned thrills? Sooner or later, the artifice becomes too noticeable. They begin to realize that an amusement park is really a kind of jail, in which you pay to be an inmate. ‘This artifice will drive them to seek authenticity. Authenticity will be the buzzword of the twenty-first century. And what is authentic? Anything that is not devised and structured to make a profit. Anything that is not controlled by corporations. Anything that exists for its own sake and assumes its own shape. But of course, nothing in the modern world is allowed to assume its own shape. The modern world is the corporate equivalent of a formal garden, where everything is planted and arranged for effect. Where nothing is untouched, where nothing is authentic.

Three-quarters of dads who were in South Carolina jails for being behind in child support payments suffer from extreme poverty. And one-eighth of all South Carolina inmates are in jail for being behind in child support payments. No dad is imprisoned for not spending enough time with his children. And it is rare for a mom to go to jail for preventing dad from spending enough time with his children.

Today, over 50 percent of prison and jail inmates in the United States have a diagnosed mental illness, a rate nearly five times greater than that of the general adult population. Nearly one in five prison and jail inmates has a serious mental illness. In fact, there are more than three times the number of seriously mentally ill individuals in jail or prison than in hospitals; in some states that number is ten times. And prison is a terrible place for someone with mental illness or a neurological disorder that prison guards are not trained to understand.

From the lowest depths of his jail cell, Joseph identifies himself for the first time with forefathers, reconnecting to his heritage despite being cut off from his family for years. Despite living in a foreign land alone amidst a foreign people, Joseph declares that he has remained true to his people’s core values. One of those values is gratitude, and for the first time Joseph acknowledges that his talents are God-given rather than earned. He has ended up in prison because of unwavering gratitude to a human master who selflessly cared for him, a devotion that mirrors his gratitude to the Divine Master. In this terrible low moment, Joseph sounds fulfilled for the first time in his life, as the principled decision to accept imprisonment provides an uplifting sense of purpose. With renewed appreciation for God’s care, Joseph challenges his fellow inmates to reject backstabbing pagan deities whose flaring egos drive them to relentlessly pursue self-aggrandizement at the expense of others. As humans naturally emulate the characteristics of their deities, Joseph prefers an ethical and compassionate Divine Mentor.

Jealousy—at least as far as he understood it from his dream—was the most hopeless prison in the world. Jealousy was not a place he was forced into by someone else, but a jail in which the inmate entered voluntarily, locked the door, and threw away the key. And not another soul in the world knew he was locked inside. Of course if he wanted to escape, he could do so. The prison was, after all, his own heart. But he couldn’t make that decision. His heart was as hard as a stone wall. This was the very essence of jealousy.

That infamous day was the most powerful reminder I have ever been given that you should never take life for granted and should treat each day as if it's your last.

It is quick to over punish and uninterested in rewarding good behavior. What would we say about an individual who had these characteristics? Mean? Cruel? Heartless? Mindless? Hypocritical? Stupid?

Jealousy—at least as far as he understood it from his dream—was the most hopeless prison in the world. Jealousy was not a place he was forced into by someone else, but a jail in which the inmate entered voluntarily, locked the door, and threw away the key.

Jealousy – at least as far as he understood it from his dream – was the most hopeless prison in the world. Jealousy was not a place he was forced into by someone else, but a jail in which the inmate entered voluntarily, locked the door, and threw away the key.

The female guard on duty that night, the slimiest one in the prison, was nowhere in sight. After that, no matter what jail i was in, i always found some way to barricade my cell. In prisons, it is not at all uncommon to find a prisoner hanged or burned to death in his cell. No matter how suspicious the circumstances, these deaths are always ruled “suicides.” They are usually Black inmates, considered to be a “threat to the orderly running of the prison.” They are usually among the most politically aware and socially conscious inmates in the prison.

John had little to fear from his jailmates. It is no longer true that inmates are hardest on those fellow prisoners who commit atrocities against the weak and vulnerable, such as children. All that is needed today to achieve respect is celebrity, and celebrity is measured in exposure on television minutes. To the inmates in Union County Jail, and some of the warders as well, John was a superstar. He was even accorded the deference of being referred to by his alias instead of the name stamped on his paperwork.

One thing it tells us is simply that the justice system is a large part of our lives. The US houses one-quarter of all inmates in the world, even though we’re only 5 percent of the global population.28 We incarcerate more people per capita than any other country; currently, nearly 2.3 million people are being held within our criminal justice system.29 This system has also become more a part of our lives in recent years. The number of people in US prisons and jails has increased 500 percent over the last four decades. In fact, today the number of people in prison for drug offenses alone exceeds the total number of people who were locked away for any crime in 1980.

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.

Convictions for drug offenses are the single most important cause of the explosion in incarceration rates in the United States. Drug offenses alone account for two-thirds of the rise in the federal inmate population and more than half of the rise in state prisoners between 1985 and 2000.1 Approximately a half-million people are in prison or jail for a drug offense today, compared to an estimated 41,100 in 1980—an increase of 1,100 percent.2 Drug arrests have tripled since 1980. As a result, more than 31 million people have been arrested for drug offenses since the drug war began.3 To put the matter in perspective, consider this: there are more people in prisons and jails today just for drug offenses than were incarcerated for all reasons in 1980.4

This book is fiction and all the characters are my own, but it was inspired by the story of the Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida. I first heard of the place in the summer of 2014 and discovered Ben Montgomery’s exhaustive reporting in the Tampa Bay Times. Check out the newspaper’s archive for a firsthand look. Mr. Montgomery’s articles led me to Dr. Erin Kimmerle and her archaeology students at the University of South Florida. Their forensic studies of the grave sites were invaluable and are collected in their Report on the Investigation into the Deaths and Burials at the Former Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida. It is available at the university’s website. When Elwood reads the school pamphlet in the infirmary, I quote from their report on the school’s day-to-day functions. Officialwhitehouseboys.org is the website of Dozier survivors, and you can go there for the stories of former students in their own words. I quote White House Boy Jack Townsley in chapter four, when Spencer is describing his attitude toward discipline. Roger Dean Kiser’s memoir, The White House Boys: An American Tragedy, and Robin Gaby Fisher’s The Boys of the Dark: A Story of Betrayal and Redemption in the Deep South (written with Michael O’McCarthy and Robert W. Straley) are excellent accounts. Nathaniel Penn’s GQ article “Buried Alive: Stories From Inside Solitary Confinement” contains an interview with an inmate named Danny Johnson in which he says, “The worst thing that’s ever happened to me in solitary confinement happens to me every day. It’s when I wake up.” Mr. Johnson spent twenty-seven years in solitary confinement; I have recast that quote in chapter sixteen. Former prison warden Tom Murton wrote about the Arkansas prison system in his book with Joe Hyams called Accomplices to the Crime: The Arkansas Prison Scandal. It provides a ground’s-eye view of prison corruption and was the basis of the movie Brubaker, which you should see if you haven’t. Julianne Hare’s Historic Frenchtown: Heart and Heritage in Tallahassee is a wonderful history of that African-American community over the years. I quote the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. a bunch; it was energizing to hear his voice in my head. Elwood cites his “Speech Before the Youth March for Integrated Schools” (1959); the 1962 LP Martin Luther King at Zion Hill, specifically the “Fun Town” section; his “Letter from Birmingham Jail”; and his 1962 speech at Cornell College. The “Negroes are Americans” James Baldwin quote is from “Many Thousands Gone” in Notes of a Native Son. I was trying to see what was on TV on July 3, 1975. The New York Times archive has the TV listings for that night, and I found a good nugget.

Dear Young Black Males, Could you imagine standing in front of a judge and hearing the words, “I now sentence you to 10 years, 20 years, 15 to LIFE, 25 to LIFE, LIFE without the possibility of parole, and/or DEATH?” Could you imagine being locked up with grown, yoked up men? Could you imagine being raped over and over again? Could you imagine other inmates taking what your family or loved ones sent you? Could you imagine being degraded as a person, and there’s nothing you can do about it? Could you imagine being made to do things that nobody should have to EVER endure? I don’t care how hard you think you are, jail and prison is NOT for young black males. And to be honest, many grown men get turned out in jail and prison too. Please think! Think about the consequences of the choices you make. It’s just NOT worth it! If you think that you’re untouchable, think again. This isn’t a game. Value your life! I’ve given you some real and raw food-for-thought to think about. Now it’s all up to YOU.

I want to say you'd be surprised by the kind of people who go visit their relatives and lovers in jail, but really you wouldn't be surprised at all. It's just like you see on TV - desperate, broken-toothed women in ugly clothes, or other ladies who dress up like streetwalkers to feel sexy among the inmates and who are waiting for marriage proposals from their men in cuffs, even if they're in maximum security and the court has already marked them for life or death penalty. There are women who come with gangs of kids who crawl over their daddies, and there are the teenagers and grown-up kids who come and sit across the picnic tables bitter-lipped while their fathers try to apologize for being there. Then there are the sisters, like me, who show up because nobody else will. Our whole family, the same people who treated my brother like he was baby Moses, all turned their backs on Carlito when he went to the slammer. Not one soul has visited him besides me. Not an uncle, a tia, a primo, a friend, anybody.

It is hard to conceive of any relationship between two adults in America being less equal than that of prisoner and prison guard. The formal relationship, enforced by the institution, is that one person’s word means everything and the other’s means almost nothing; one person can command the other to do just about anything, and refusal can result in total physical restraint. That fact is like a slap in the face. Even in relation to the people who are anointed with power in the outside world—cops, elected officials, soldiers—we have rights within our interactions. We have a right to speak to power, though we may not exercise it. But when you step behind the walls of a prison as an inmate, you lose that right. It evaporates, and it’s terrifying. And pretty unsurprising when the extreme inequality of the daily relationship between prisoners and their jailers leads very naturally into abuses of many flavors, from small humiliations to hideous crimes. Every year guards at Danbury and other women’s prisons around the country are caught sexually abusing prisoners. Several years after I came home, one of Danbury’s lieutenants, a seventeen-year corrections veteran, was one of them. He was prosecuted and spent one month in jail.

The movement actually managed to succeed in lobbying for the passage of involuntary sterilization laws in thirty American states. This meant that the state could neuter people who fell below a particular IQ without their having any say in the matter. That each state eventually repealed the laws is a testament to common sense and compassion. That the laws existed in the first place is a frightening indication of how dangerously limited any standardized test is in calculating intelligence and the capacity to contribute to society. IQ tests can even be a matter of life and death. A criminal who commits a capital offense is not subject to the death penalty if his IQ is below seventy. However, IQ scores regularly rise over the course of a generation (by as much as twenty-five points), causing the scale to be reset every fifteen to twenty years to maintain a mean score of one hundred. Therefore, someone who commits a capital offense may be more likely to be put to death at the beginning of a cycle than at the end. That’s giving a single test an awful lot of responsibility. People can also improve their scores through study and practice. I read a case recently about a death row inmate who’d at that point spent ten years in jail on a life sentence (he wasn’t the trigger man, but he’d been involved in a robbery where someone died). During his incarceration, he took a series of courses. When retested, his IQ had risen more than ten points—suddenly making him eligible for execution.

Inmates would overwhelmingly welcome segregation. As Lexy Good, a white prisoner in San Quentin State Prison explained, “I’d rather hang out with white people, and blacks would rather hang out with people of their own race.” He said it was the same outside of prison: “Look at suburbia. . . . People in society self-segregate.” Another white man, using the pen name John Doe, wrote that jail time in Texas had turned him against blacks: '[B]ecause of my prison experiences, I cannot stand being in the presence of blacks. I can’t even listen to my old, favorite Motown music anymore. The barbarous and/or retarded blacks in prison have ruined it for me. The black prison guards who comprise half the staff and who flaunt the dominance of African-American culture in prison and give favored treatment to their “brothers” have ruined it for me.' He went on: '[I]n the aftermath of the Byrd murder [the 1998 dragging death in Jasper, Texas] I read one commentator’s opinion in which he expressed disappointment that ex-cons could come out of prison with unresolved racial problems “despite the racial integration of the prisons.” Despite? Buddy, do I have news for you! How about because of racial integration?' (emphasis in the original) A man who served four years in a California prison wrote an article for the Los Angeles Times called “Why Prisons Can’t Integrate.” “California prisons separate blacks, whites, Latinos and ‘others’ because the truth is that mixing races and ethnic groups in cells would be extremely dangerous for inmates,” he wrote. He added that segregation “is looked on by no one—of any race—as oppressive or as a way of promoting racism.” He offered “Rule No. 1” for survival: “The various races and ethnic groups stick together.” There were no other rules. He added that racial taboos are so complex that only a person of the same race can be an effective guide.

FRANKLIN, Ind. — A Johnson County Jail inmate has died, four days after he was found unconscious after swallowing toilet paper. The 42-year-old Greenwood, Ind., man died Saturday of asphyxiation because of a foreign object, according to an autopsy. His death was ruled a suicide, county Coroner Craig Lutz said.

trusted and, for a while, things simmered down. The inmates of La Vega were a strange lot. There were killers, bank robbers, kidnappers and bombers everywhere, but we realised quite soon on that they were all really immature. As a consequence, it was easy to sidetrack them to help defuse situations. Paul was a master at this. For example, Bebe would go ape about something petty like his coffee going missing, and we’d start singing UB40, Oasis or Beatles songs. It would confuse them into submission. They’d go, ‘What the hell is that?’ and the next thing you’d know, we were giving them a lesson in English music.

Beyond mass incarceration, beginning in the 1990s we adopted a new set of criminal justice strategies that further punish poor people for their poverty. Low-income people are arrested for minor violations that are only annoyances for people with means but are disastrous for the poor and near poor because of the high fines and fees we now almost routinely impose. Poor people are held in jail to await trial when they cannot afford bail, fined excessive amounts, and hit with continuously mounting costs and fees. Failure to pay begets more jail time, more debts from accumulated interest charges, additional fines and fees, and, in a common penalty with significant consequences for those living below or near the poverty line, repeated driver's license suspensions. Poor people lose their liberty and often lose their jobs, are frequently barred from a host of public benefits, may lose custody of their children, and may even lose their right to vote. And immigrants, even some with green cards, can be subject to deportation. Once incarcerated, impoverished inmates with no access to paid work are often charged for their room and board. Many debtors will carry debts to their deaths, often hounded by bill collectors and new prosecutions.

Someone in the women's cell was crying and cursing the fleas. Some whore probably, the kind that would take on anybody. She was no good either. Fabiano wanted to yell to the whole town, to the judge, the chief of police, the priest, and the tax collector, that nobody in there was worth a damn. He, the men squatting around the fire, the drunk, the woman with the fleas —they were all completely worthless, fit only to be hanged.

Manson was moved from jail to jail throughout the 1970s and ‘80s, spending stretches of time in Protective Housing Units to keep him safe from other prisoners. But in September 1984, Manson was seriously injured when a fellow inmate poured paint thinner on him and set him on fire.

Prisons by Stewart Stafford There are prisons of bars and jailers, There are dungeons of the mind, And of family blackmailers. Some sit manacled in a marriage cell, Thunderous isolation next door, All aflame in loveless hell. Misery, with no parole in poverty's trap, While in privileged ivory towers nearby, Elite confinement in luxury's lap. Inmates break free to a new golden age, Other jailbirds await merciful luck, Destined never to escape the cage. © Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.

From the higher point of view adopted by the plague, everyone, from the prison governor to the least of the inmates, was condemned, and perhaps for the first time absolute justice reigned inside the jail.

Omaha native Paul Stratman spent forty-four years in the electrical trade, laying wire, managing people, and eventually doing 3D modeling. Then he retired. Dissatisfaction soon set in. “My wife had a long list of things she wanted done around the house,” Paul said, “but that took me less than a year to complete. And I certainly didn’t want to just sit around the house doing nothing for the rest of my life. I wanted to help people.” About this time, he heard about a group of retired tradesmen in the Omaha area who call themselves the Geezers. Several times each week, for a half day at a time, a group of five to ten Geezers meets in North Omaha (a poorer part of town) to rebuild a house for later use by a nonprofit. “Currently, we’re rebuilding a home that will house six former inmates,” Paul told me. “We’re providing the home, and the nonprofit will provide the mentorship when the gentlemen move in.” The goal is to help formerly incarcerated people build better lives and stay out of jail. The rate of recidivism in the United States reaches as high as 83 percent.[12] “Our goal is zero percent among the men who will occupy this home when we are finished,” Paul said. On a previous occasion, after the devastating 2019 midwestern floods, Paul was working as a volunteer in the area to restore electricity to many of the homes when he received an urgent phone call concerning a couple in their fifties whose home had been destroyed in the flood. The couple were living in a camper with their teenage daughter and three grandkids (whose mother was unable to take care of them) while they tried to get enough money to fix their house. Six people in a tiny camper! The couple were worried because they had been informed that someone from Nebraska’s Division of Children and Family Services would be coming to inspect the living conditions for the three grandkids. The couple feared their grandkids were going to be taken from them. They were almost frantic to prevent that. Would Paul help? Paul went right to work. He completed the electrical wiring and safety renovations inside the flood-damaged home, free of charge, in time for it to pass inspection by CFS. The family stayed together. Reflecting on this experience, Paul said, “When you can help people that are so desperate, and can make a little difference in their lives—people who have put their lives on hold to care for the needs of someone else—it is moving. That was one of the most emotional experiences I’ve ever had and some of the most meaningful work I’ve ever accomplished.” Paul has retired from his job, but he hasn’t stopped working for others.

you losing your testicles by an inmate you meet on your first day in jail after committing one of your felonies you seem to find joy in.

The cacophony of county jail is deafening: That's what hap- pens when you jam thousands of women into concrete rooms that were intended to house a population half our size. We sleep in bunk beds in the common areas, feet away from the tables where we play cards and read all day. We urinate in overwhelmed toilets that clog and overflow. We stand in lines for showers, meals, hair- cuts, telephones, meds. At all hours of the day and night, the con- crete echoes with screams and prayers and tears and laughter and curses. There is nothing to do here but wait. I mill around the common room in my canary-yellow prison suit, watching the hands of the clock in the cage on the wall slowly ticking away the minutes of the days. I wait for mealtime, though I have no interest in eating the gray slurry that slides around tray. I wait for the library cart to come around, so I can pick out the least offensive romance novel on offer. I wait for lights-out, so that I can lie in my upper bunk in the semi-dark, listening to the snores and whispers of my fellow inmates while I wait for sleep to come. my It hardly ever does. But mostly, I wait for someone to come help me.

The inmates invariably reflected back to me in exaggerated ways my own issues, my own stopping places, or as Jungians call it, my shadow. Sometimes I wondered why I so eagerly grabbed my coat, zipped out the door, and drove to the jail on Tuesday nights when it meant that I was forced to confront my flaws.

Hicks next told them what was most relevant in justifying a federal probe. Should the FBI send an agent to the jail at Charleston, he should talk to an inmate named Sarah, who “will tell you that during the Sumner murder trial when Sheriff H. C. Strider was saying that he could not locate Too Tight Collins, actually Collins was at that time locked up in the Charleston jail.” Sarah, according to Hicks, was granted various privileges at the jail for performing sexual favors for the inmates as well as for Strider.

But where will this mania for entertainment end? What will people do when they get tired of television? When they get tired of movies? We already know the answer—they go into participatory activities: sports, theme parks, amusement rides, roller coasters. Structured fun, planned thrills. And what will they do when they tire of theme parks and planned thrills? Sooner or later, the artifice becomes too noticeable. They begin to realize that an amusement park is really a kind of jail, in which you pay to be an inmate.

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—a 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, “From a Native Trans Daughter

Simply jailing newly free uppity blacks was an effective but expensive solution to the problem of control. Selling or leasing the inmates instead not only saved states the cost of incarceration, it earned them a profit. Eventually, leasing would provide the state of Alabama with one quarter of its yearly revenue and provide industry with untold profits. Arrest rates reflected the desire for profit.

If there is a more dispiriting place in Miami than the county jail, I haven’t found it . . . and I’ve spent a lot of time at the morgue. Approaching the jail, you can hear the anguished shouts of inmates on the upper floors, yelling through the barred windows at their wives, girlfriends, and homies below. Inside, you’ve got that institutional smell, as if a harsh cleanser has been laced with urine. Buzzers blare and lights flash. Steel crashes against steel as doors bang shut with the finality of a coffin closing.

Could it be possible?—as by the match with which Stuyvesant and I lighted our cigars, we saw my watch—ten o’clock! “Stuyvesant,” I whispered, “we are in for an adventure sure enough. I don’t know exactly where we are, but the horses are about used up, and I’m frozen.” He turned and boldly told the party our situation, trying to make it out as a jolly good joke. The ladies did not appreciate it, except little Lucy. She did not say much, but evidently thought it a most delightful experience of romantic reality. Adelaide and Mrs. Grayson were really alarmed, and I am pretty sure that as we drove on again, I heard Cousin Daisy repeating parts of Eastman’s Snow Storm: “But cold and dead by the sunken log, Are they who came from the town.” We pushed on for another half hour, which seemed a whole night time, and then pulled up before a farmhouse, in which the inmates were a long while under blankets. A rascally cur screeched and yelped at us. That, however, and our united voices calling for about ten minutes, aroused someone, for we heard a sash frostily resist lifting, and a male nightmare full voice say, “What in the devil do you want?” Stuyvesant asked for the necessary information, and we learned that we were twelve miles from our destination and four from the nearest village. The window dropped with a bang, but the word reached me, too, something like “jam,” or “slam,” or “ram.” “Ho! Halloo!” sang out Stuyvesant in alarm, “where in the mischief are you driving, Earnest? Here we are over the runners in a drift.” The fact is, I had my eyes on a dark, irregular building just ahead, and I was trying to make out if it was a poorhouse or a jail.

Administrators at Rikers Island claim today that their large prison colony is a “huge employment opportunity” for the South Bronx. While caging some 14,000 inmates across some 14 different jail units, Rikers employs 11,500 people as correctional officers or civilian staff.

People can say that I became famous because of 911. I became America's top cop, cultivated a political profile, wrote books, became a security consultant. But I'd give anything for that day not to have happened. I wish it hadn't. But it did. And I happen to be there at the time. I was there, and I did the best I could do under the circumstances. It's all any of us did.

To the left and at the end of our small wing that held eight prisoners was an NYPD officer named Gilberto Valle, who’d been charged with conspiring to cook and eat his girlfriend. The press had dubbed him the “Cannibal Cop.

Not even when it had my name did I really think about what it would be like to pass days and months and years in those boxes, to be on the other side of the treatment,

80 percent of death row inmates in the U.S. are products of the juvenile justice system.

Opening yourself directly to the spiritual sources—be they evil or holy—is dangerous business. You risk opening the front door of your heart to forces as complicated and conflicted as the streets and prisons. (As inmates have made sure to remind me, regarding such environments: “Not everyone’s there to help you, Chris. You can get fucked up really quickly.” Those words, I think, apply to the unmediated spiritual realm.) But there’s an even greater danger. You risk making contact with a Love somewhere out there that is so pure, so good, it makes you feel more, hurt more, notice more, care more, makes you embarrassingly odd and terribly sensitive, welcoming strangers, touching the lepers like Francis in Assisi, or getting dragged to court and stuck with the death penalty between two thieves like Jesus did. Or—and this is most common—if you lose that connection that filled you like the sun, it can be a loss so disorienting that even the hope required for real prayer—someone suggesting you open up again, say, to God—can drive you mad. Any way you come at it, it’s a dangerous game.

I believed removing Saddam from power was the right thing to do at the time, and I was also motivated by 9/11. Weapons of mass destruction or not, Saddam had murdered and displaced millions of his own countrymen and was funding suicidal terror operations against the state of Israel…

It smelled like a slaughterhouse. I was standing in the interrogation room of Saddam Hussein's Abu Ghraib prison on the outskirts of Baghdad. A stench of blood and death permeated my senses, my clothes, my being.

Arrests and convictions have increased at such a torrid pace that the states and federal government haven’t been able to build prisons fast enough to hold all of their incoming prisoners. To keep up, they hired corporations to operate private prisons for them. About 130,000 prisoners are held in these “for-profit” prisons (Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics 2010:Table 6.32.2009). Actually, the United States has even more prisoners than shown in Figure 6.2, since this total does not include jail inmates. If we add them, the total comes to about 2.3 million people—about one out of every 135 citizens. Not only does the United States have more prisoners than any other country in the world but it also has a larger percentage of its population in prison (Massoglia et al. 2013). Another way of putting this is that the United States has only 5 percent of the world’s population but about 25 percent of the world’s prisoners

Criminal Justice A complex, sensitive topic affecting African Americans is their role in criminal justice. It was reported in 2010 that Blacks constitute 4.7 percent of all lawyers, 14.1 percent of police officers, 14.9 percent of detectives, and 28.6 percent of security guards but 39 percent of jail inmates.

While he read, spun, walked or wrote, Gandhi was under the watch of ‘convict warders’, the prisoners who had been in Yerwada for a long time and whose good behaviour allowed them to supervise new entrants. The first warder assigned to look after Gandhi was a Punjabi Hindu called Harkaran, who had been convicted of murder, and already served nine years of a fourteen-year sentence. Harkaran was a master of stealing and hiding trifles, as indeed were many other prisoners in Yerwada. As Gandhi was to wryly write later: ‘If the whole of the jail yard were to be dug up twelve inches deep, it would yield up many a secret in the shape of spoons, knives, pots, cigarettes, soaps, and such like.’ Harkaran, ‘being one of the oldest inmates of Yerwada, was a sort of purveyor-general to the prisoners’. If an inmate wanted a knife, spoon, pot or pan, he knew where and how to get one. Harkaran watched over Gandhi during the day. At night, he was replaced by a powerful Baloch named Shabaskhan, also convicted of murder. Gandhi thought the authorities had deliberately chosen a Muslim to balance the Hindu. Not that he minded, for Shabaskhan’s build reminded him of his friend Shaukat Ali, while he told Gandhi on the very first day: ‘I am not going to watch you at all. Treat me as your friend and do exactly as you like'.

Jealousy—at least as far as he understood it from his dream—was the most hopeless prison in the world. Jealousy was not a place he was forced into by someone else, but a jail in which the inmate entered voluntarily, locked the door, and threw away the key. And not another soul in the world knew he was locked inside. Of course if he wanted to escape, he could do so. The prison was, after all, his own heart.

Kenton County began shuttling inmates from 104 directly to the LLC to avoid the perilous bus trip. The day before I met Webb-Edgington, eleven people from the jail arrived. LLC staff fed them, then got busy finding them beds in sober-living houses. They fitted a couple for eyeglasses. One man was wearing only shorts; outside, the temperature was 21 degrees. LLC staff dug him up a pair of pants. Kenton County jailer Terry Carl hired a social worker to sign inmates up for Medicaid. They often asked her for dental care, too. Ravaged teeth were as public a sign of street addiction as visible tattoos. Improved smiles, on the other hand, helped their confidence; then they dressed better and they got their hair cut, too. Some of them got tattoos removed by Jo Martin, who in the winter of 2019, three years after being turned away, moved her lasers into an office at the LLC. Jason Merrick imagined now what he called “recovery-ready communities”—towns geared to helping addicts recover. “This is what rehabilitation looks like,” Merrick told me. “It’s a full continuum of care, not just punishment.

Clint Low, the sheriff of Mason County in Texas, told the Associated Press that pink walls were used to calm tempers at the cramped prison. Built in 1894, the tiny jail is a historical site and does not need to conform to the guidelines of the state prison. The sheriff also reported that the reoffending rate was down by a staggering 70 percent since introducing the color pink in the prison, and that no fights occurred among inmates since the walls were painted pink.

Cindy Haden wanted to be able to touch Richard, hold him, and be close to him, and she constantly thought of ways she could make that happen. When her employer had a mass layoff and she was fired, she decided she would become a private detective. If she had a detective’s license, she’d be able to work with Richard’s new San Francisco attorneys and have a visit with Richard in a private room. She applied for a job with a San Francisco security firm, was hired, and moved to San Francisco. She took a quiet apartment in Richmond. The security firm sponsored her for a license, and she passed the required examination. She went to one of the San Francisco public defenders representing Richard and talked him into taking her inside the county jail with him when he went to visit Richard. She and the attorney were shown into one of seven rooms allocated for lawyers who come to see inmates. It was ten by ten and had a wooden table and a few chairs. There were panels of glass in a wall so guards could look in. As Cindy waited for Richard to be brought down, her heart raced. She paced back and forth, her hands trembling. When Richard got there, the guard uncuffed him and he sat at the table. They were like two school kids, laughing and giggling. Under the desk she raised her foot and put it on Richard’s thigh; his eyes bulged. He couldn’t believe he was actually sitting with one of the jurors who had handed him a ticket to the death room. After a few minutes, Cindy later related, the attorney went to look for a bathroom. When he left and Cindy was sure there were no guards about, she stood and quickly gave Richard a deep kiss as he groped her with his huge hands. She nearly passed out, she was so excited. When later asked if she was afraid to be alone with Richard, she said, “No, absolutely not. He’d never hurt me.” When the lawyer returned, Cindy sat down, breathless, her heart pounding. On subsequent visits to the jail, as she helped with Richard’s legal problems, she says, she was able to have more contact visits and was actually alone with Richard.

Richard was handed over to heavily armed, grim-faced San Quentin officials. He was put in the A/C block, known as Reception. His prison number was E37101. All prisoners—except death row inmates—were kept in Reception while they were evaluated and it was decided where they would do their actual time. Richard still had the Pan assault and murder charges against him, and until that case had been adjudicated, he would not be moved to E block after his obligatory three-month stay in Reception. He would, after evaluation, be transferred to the San Francisco County Jail, to be closer to court for hearings and motions on the Pan matter. Lawyers from the San Francisco public defender’s office would be representing Richard in the Pan incident. Richard was put in another six-by-eight-foot cell with an aluminum toilet, a sink, and a bunk bed. Prisoners in reception did not have access to phones, and their visits were for only two hours a week. In E block, the inmates were allowed twenty-four hours a week for visits, and Reception inmates were kept in the cell nearly twenty-four hours a day. Richard was assigned cell number 3AC8.

In February 1990, Ramirez was moved to the San Francisco County Jail, where he had access to a phone and a television and interacted with other inmates. Almost immediately, he got into a fight over the phones and beat up some guy who’d called him a punk. Richard knew he couldn’t let anyone abuse him in any way, for the abuse would surely get worse and more than likely end up as an assault against him. He was quick to let everyone in the jail know if you bothered him, you’d better be ready to fight to the end. This resulted in his being left alone and he could do his time without being bothered.

During the course of Sean’s stay in the jail, Ramirez asked Penn for his autograph. Sean wrote: Dear Richard: It’s impossible to be incarcerated and not feel a kinship with your fellow inmates. Well, Richard, I’ve done the impossible. I feel absolutely no kinship with you. Sean Penn

it’s true that, throughout history, certain sorts of debt, and certain sorts of debtor, have always been treated differently than others. In the 1720s, one of the things that most scandalized the British public when conditions at debtors’ prisons were exposed in the popular press was the fact that these prisons were regularly divided into two sections. Aristocratic inmates, who often thought of a brief stay in Fleet or Marshalsea as something of a fashion statement, were wined and dined by liveried servants and allowed to receive regular visits from prostitutes. On the “common side,” impoverished debtors were shackled together in tiny cells, “covered with filth and vermin,” as one report put it, “and suffered to die, without pity, of hunger and jail fever.

The house that had once felt so warm, so welcoming, doesn't anymore. The walls close in like a jail cell, and she's not sure whether the faces that surround her are her fellow inmates or her jailers

Friends?” I scoff. “Matt, I’ll be spending the next year of my life manifesting the shit out of you losing your testicles by an inmate you meet on your first day in jail after committing one of your felonies you seem to find joy in.

Built in 1975, the Division Four unit is, like Henry Horner, made of cinder block, which jail authorities quickly learned did not provide the best of security. Because prisoners scraped through the mortar with metal spoons, the jail switched to plastic utensils in 1979. And after several inmates used the top of their dressers to beat through the walls, some in as little time as a minute and a half, the dressers were finally removed in 1981.

The fee to cover the average cost of incarceration for Federal inmates was $34,704.12 ($94.82 per day) in FY 2016.

In 1955 state psychiatric hospitals held more than 500,000 patients with severe mental illness. Today our jails and state prisons contain an estimated 356,000 inmates with serious mental illness, while only about 35,000 people with serious mental illness are being treated in state hospitals—stark evidence of the decimation of the public mental-health system. This reality is worth reiterating: ten times more people with serious mental illness are in our nation’s correctional facilities than in our state psychiatric hospitals.

Solitary confinement is presented in our country as a means of dealing with violence, of attempting to protect correctional officers and the general prison population from dangerous inmates. But the stated purpose plainly differs from the reality. While major infractions in jails and prisons routinely lead to administrative segregation, the accumulation of multiple minor violations can also result in solitary confinement, or an extension of a person’s time therein. Of the 13,000 times that detainees are sent to disciplinary segregation in the state of New York each year, for example, roughly 85 percent are punishments for nonviolent infractions.

We are all inmates and doing our time in the prison called ‘world

This way of treating the mentally ill is a national crisis, an “ongoing and spreading nightmare” across other states. Prisons today serve as the largest mental health institutions in 44 of 50 states. Dart notes that nationally, “10 times as many mentally ill individuals are currently incarcerated as reside in our state hospitals.”[66] Many psychiatric hospitals and facilities have been closed, as have our schools, while prisons continue being built.[67] Dart cites the National Alliance on Mental Illness, reminding that “states collectively cut $4.35 billion in mental health spending between 2009 to 2012.” While there are violent-prone mentally ill in the jails, these, Dart emphasizes, are the exceptions: “These mentally ill are not hardened criminals. The vast majority of these inmates are charged with low-level crimes of survival: prostitution, trespassing, disorderly conduct. Many are facing drug charges . . . They are, for the most part, good people who suffer from an illness beyond their control and simply need their government to have its priorities straight.

Today in America, more than 2 million people are in jail, disproportionately black, Latino, and Native American. That is a greater number of inmates than in any other country on earth—including China, which has a population four times greater than ours and an authoritarian government that does not tolerate dissent.

Staff and patients seemed to me to share in the mental illness, much as prison guards and inmates share a jail mentality.

Who would sleep with the lights on 24 hours a day?

You would be shocked if you saw what the inside of a USA jail really looks like!

The sort of mental institutions that used to house large numbers of patients for years at a time have all but disappeared. The institutionalized population of people with mental illness has shifted from asylums, which at least theoretically offered treatment to reduce suffering, to jails and prisons that house Black and Brown people in ever-increasing numbers. One estimate attributes 7 percent of the overall growth in the prison population form 1980 to 2000 to the deinstitutionalization of people with severe mental illness, landing an additional 40,000 to 72,000 people in jail or prison. Mental illness is far overrepresented in the inmates housed in such institutions; according to the American Psychological Association, 64 percent of those in jail, 54 percent of those in state prisons, and 45 percent of those in federal prisons have a mental illness, compared to a baseline rate of about 20 percent in the general population. Conditions associated with the modern prison industrial complex—including overcrowding, pervasive threats of violence, and the overuse of solitary confinement— are practically designed to further inflame the symptoms of mental illness. Any "treatment" incarcerated individuals receive is often aimed at blunting their symptoms to make them docile and compliant, not to restore them to health. Returning citizens often go back to chronically underdeveloped neighborhoods with few options available to receive mental health treatment, ensuring the cycle of mass incarceration and the criminalization of serious mental illness continues.