Prisoners Motivational Quotes

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Hard work is only a prison sentence when you lack motivation
Malcolm Gladwell (Outliers: The Story of Success)
The whole value of solitude depends upon oneself; it may be a sanctuary or a prison, a haven of repose or a place of punishment, a heaven or a hell, as we ourselves make it.
John Lubbock (Peace and Happiness)
The wish of death had been palpably hanging over this otherwise idyllic paradise for a good many years. All business and politics is personal in the Philippines. If it wasn't for the cheap beer and lovely girls one of us would spend an hour in this dump. They [Jehovah's Witnesses] get some kind of frequent flyer points for each person who signs on. I'm not lazy. I'm just motivationally challenged. I'm not fat. I just have lots of stored energy. You don't get it do you? What people think of you matters more than the reality. Marilyn. Despite standing firm at the final hurdle Marilyn was always ready to run the race. After answering the question the woman bent down behind the stand out of sight of all, and crossed herself. It is amazing what you can learn in prison. Merely through casual conversation Rick had acquired the fundamentals of embezzlement, fraud and armed hold up. He wondered at the price of honesty in a grey world whose half tones changed faster than the weather. The banality of truth somehow always surprises the news media before they tart it up. You've ridden jeepneys in peak hour. Where else can you feel up a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl without even trying? [Ralph Winton on the Philippines finer points] Life has no bottom. No matter how bad things are or how far one has sunk things can always get worse. You could call the Oval Office an information rain shadow. In the Philippines, a whole layer of criminals exists who consider that it is their right to rob you unhindered. If you thwart their wicked desires, to their way of thinking you have stolen from them and are evil. There's honest and dishonest corruption in this country. Don't enjoy it too much for it's what we love that usually kills us. The good guys don't always win wars but the winners always make sure that they go down in history as the good guys. The Philippines is like a woman. You love her and hate her at the same time. I never believed in all my born days that ideas of truth and justice were only pretty words to brighten a much darker and more ubiquitous reality. The girl was experiencing the first flushes of love while Rick was at least feeling the methadone equivalent. Although selfishness and greed are more ephemeral than the real values of life their effects on the world often outlive their origins. Miriam's a meteor job. Somewhere out there in space there must be a meteor with her name on it. Tsismis or rumours grow in this land like tropical weeds. Surprises are so common here that nothing is surprising. A crooked leader who can lead is better than a crooked one who can't. Although I always followed the politics of Hitler I emulate the drinking habits of Churchill. It [Australia] is the country that does the least with the most. Rereading the brief lines that told the story in the manner of Fox News reporting the death of a leftist Rick's dark imagination took hold. Didn't your mother ever tell you never to trust a man who doesn't drink? She must have been around twenty years old, was tall for a Filipina and possessed long black hair framing her smooth olive face. This specter of loveliness walked with the assurance of the knowingly beautiful. Her crisp and starched white uniform dazzled in the late-afternoon light and highlighted the natural tan of her skin. Everything about her was in perfect order. In short, she was dressed up like a pox doctor’s clerk. Suddenly, she stopped, turned her head to one side and spat comprehensively into the street. The tiny putrescent puddle contrasted strongly with the studied aplomb of its all-too-recent owner, suggesting all manner of disease and decay.
John Richard Spencer
While people argue with one another about the specifics of Freud's work and blame him for the prejudices of his time, they overlook the fundamental truth of his writing, his grand humility: that we frequently do not know our own motivations in life and are prisoners to what we cannot understand. We can recognize only a small fragment of our own, and an even smaller fragment of anyone else's, impetus.
Andrew Solomon (The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression)
War is not just the shower of bullets and bombs from both sides, it is also the shower of blood and bones on both sides.
Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
If you are staying inside your comfort zone, It means you are in a prison and that hinders your life.
Mohith Agadi
To an optimist loneliness is freedom, to all others it is prison.
Amit Kalantri
Power does not pardon, power punishes.
Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
It is up to us to never forget who we truly are.
Tamuna Tsertsvadze (The Prison of Deviants)
Your people are spoiled," Loki said. "You can't convince them to do anything." "We're spoiled?" Finn scoffed. "That would mean something if it weren't coming from a brat Prince." "I don't know why you find my comment so offensive." Loki sat up straighter. "I've seen the way these people treat Wendy, and she's their Princess. They're insolent." "They don't know her," Finn said. "It takes time, and it doesn't help that she spends so much of it with Vittra prisoners." "I'm not a prisoner." Loki looked disgusted. "I'm here on my own." "I do not understand that." Finn shook his head in disbelief. "Finn, he asked for amnesty, and I granted it," I said. "But your motivations completely baffle me," Finn said. "We're fighting the Vittra, and you let him stay without consequence." "It really pisses you off that much that she wants me around?" Loki asked, and Finn glared at him.
Amanda Hocking (Ascend (Trylle, #3))
The night I shaved it off altogether, a Staff named Mark, whose take-no-prisoners approach I respected and feared, pulled me aside, looked me hard in the face, and said, Marya, your hair. I said, Yeah, so? crossing my arms in front of me. He said, It’s harsh. I said, Yeah, well. He leaned down and whispered to me: No matter how thin you get, no matter how short you cut your hair, it’s still going to be you underneath. And he let go of my arm and walked down the hall. I didn’t want it to be me underneath. I wanted to kill the me underneath. The fact haunted my days and nights. When you realize you hate yourself so much, when you realize that you cannot stand who you are, and this deep spite has been the motivation behind your behaviour for many years, your brain can’t quite deal with it.
Marya Hornbacher (Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia)
It occurred to me. . .that aberrance is a wholly human construct. There were no such things as monsters outside the human mind. We are vain and arrogant, evolution's highest achievement and most dismal failure, prisoners of our self-awareness and the illusion that we stand in the center, that there is us and then there is everything else but us. But we do not stand apart from or above or in the middle of anything. There is nothing apart, nothing above, and the middle is everywhere - and nowhere. We are no more beautiful and essential or magnificent than an earthworm. In fact - and dare we go there, you and I? - you could say the worm is more beautiful, because it is innocent and we are not. The worm has no motive but to survive long enough to make baby worms. There is no betrayal, no cruelty, no envy, no lust, and no hatred in the worm's heart, and so who are the monsters and which species shall we call aberrant?
Rick Yancey (The Final Descent (The Monstrumologist, #4))
In the hectic pace of the world today, there is no time for meditation, or for deep thought. A prisoner has time that he can put to good use. I’d put prison second to college as the best place for a man to go if he needs to do some thinking. If he’s motivated, in prison he can change his life.
Malcolm X (The Autobiography of Malcolm X)
While people argue with one another about the specifics of Freud’s work and blame him for the prejudices of his time, they overlook the fundamental truth of his writing, his grand humility: that we frequently do not know our own motivations in life and are prisoners to what we cannot understand.
Andrew Solomon (The Noonday Demon)
If you can't do anything about it then let it go. Don't be a prisoner to things you can't change.
Aamir Sarfraz (aamir rajput khan)
Recently I interviewed a psychopath. This is always a humbling experience because it teaches over and over how much of human motivation and experience is outside my narrow range. Despite the psychopath's lack of conscience and lack of empathy for others, he is inevitably better at fooling people than any other type of offender. I suppose conscience just slows you down. A child convicted molester, this particular one made friends with a correctional officer who invited him to live in his home after he was released - despite the fact the officer had a nine-year-old daughter. The officer and his wife were so taken with the offender that, after the offender lived with them for a few months, they initiated adoption proceedings- adoption for a man almost their age. Of course, he was a child molester living in the same house as a child. Not surprisingly, he molested the daughter the entire time he lived there. [...] What these experiences taught have me is that even when people are warned of a previously founded case of even a conviction, they still routinely underestimate the pathology with which they are dealing.
Anna C. Salter (Predators: Pedophiles, Rapists, and Other Sex Offenders)
Your life looks like a prison because you focus on the things you wish you had and thus don’t appreciate what you already have. So why don’t you try to see the abundance in your life? Because, if you haven’t noticed, you’ve got many things to thank for. Just look around.
Lidiya K. (This Moment)
imitation of notable models as an effective spring of learning; was the most ancient and effective motivation to learn—to become like someone admirable—put to death deliberately by institutional pedagogy.
John Taylor Gatto (The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation Into the Prison of Modern Schooling)
Freedom comes from focus, focus brings freedom. Focus on fear you will always be in prison, focus on faith and is nothing the world can keep you knocked down.
Patience Johnson (Why Does an Orderly God Allow Disorder)
Every place you don’t want to be at feels like a prison. And we have so many desires, expectations and go back to the past and think about the future so often, that I can safely say that we live in such a prison all the time. So each time you wish you were somewhere else right now is another solid wall you build and thus make this imaginary building even stronger.
Lidiya K. (This Moment)
Why does man accept to live a trivial life? Because of the danger of a full horizon of experience, of course. This is the deeper motivation of philistinism, that it celebrates the triumph over possibility, over freedom. Philistinism knows its real enemy: freedom is dangerous. If you follow it too willingly it threatens to pull you into the air; if you give it up too wholly, you become a prisoner of necessity. The safest thing is to toe the mark of what is socially possible.
Ernest Becker (The Denial of Death)
New Rule: Not everything in America has to make a profit. If conservatives get to call universal health care "socialized medicine," I get to call private, for-profit health care "soulless vampire bastards making money off human pain." Now, I know what you're thinking: "But, Bill, the profit motive is what sustains capitalism." Yes, and our sex drive is what sustains the human species, but we don't try to fuck everything. It wasn't that long ago when a kid in America broke his leg, his parents took him to the local Catholic hospital, the nun stuck a thermometer in his ass, the doctor slapped some plaster on his ankle, and you were done. The bill was $1.50; plus, you got to keep the thermometer. But like everything else that's good and noble in life, some bean counter decided that hospitals could be big business, so now they're not hospitals anymore; they're Jiffy Lubes with bedpans. The more people who get sick, and stay sick, the higher their profit margins, which is why they're always pushing the Jell-O. Did you know that the United States is ranked fiftieth in the world in life expectancy? And the forty-nine loser countries were they live longer than us? Oh, it's hardly worth it, they may live longer, but they live shackled to the tyranny of nonprofit health care. Here in America, you're not coughing up blood, little Bobby, you're coughing up freedom. The problem with President Obama's health-care plan isn't socialism. It's capitalism. When did the profit motive become the only reason to do anything? When did that become the new patriotism? Ask not what you could do for your country, ask what's in it for Blue Cross Blue Shield. And it's not just medicine--prisons also used to be a nonprofit business, and for good reason--who the hell wants to own a prison? By definition, you're going to have trouble with the tenants. It's not a coincidence that we outsourced running prisons to private corporations and then the number of prisoners in America skyrocketed. There used to be some things we just didn't do for money. Did you know, for example, there was a time when being called a "war profiteer" was a bad thing? FDR said he didn't want World War II to create one millionaire, but I'm guessing Iraq has made more than a few executives at Halliburton into millionaires. Halliburton sold soldiers soda for $7.50 a can. They were honoring 9/11 by charging like 7-Eleven. Which is wrong. We're Americans; we don't fight wars for money. We fight them for oil. And my final example of the profit motive screwing something up that used to be good when it was nonprofit: TV news. I heard all the news anchors this week talk about how much better the news coverage was back in Cronkite's day. And I thought, "Gee, if only you were in a position to do something about it.
Bill Maher (The New New Rules: A Funny Look At How Everybody But Me Has Their Head Up Their Ass)
Strike first, draw blood, and take no prisoners.
Mink (Possessive Stepbrother)
Your self-imposed prison. That think called your COMFORT ZONE. Challenge it, stretch it. You will thank yourself.
Tony Curl
Don't imprison yourself through self-doubt. Break out of your self-imposed prison with intentional action.
Tony Curl
Care about what other people think and you will always be their prisoner.
Reza Nazari (Memorable Quotes: From Top 50 Greatest Motivational Speakers of All Time)
Learn from the past, but don't be a prisoner of it.
Jamie Larbi (A Fresh Start: 5 Keys to Stepping into Your Best Season)
I still live And I feel That I will never die All my life An infinite time Both an eternity And a prison But perhaps these two are one
Jazalyn (vViIrRuUsS: I Never Forget)
Fear is an extraordinary force for motivating people; it pushes people to hurry up and determines their direction.
Behrouz Boochani (No Friend But the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison)
Epicurus founded a school of philosophy which placed great emphasis on the importance of pleasure. "Pleasure is the beginning and the goal of a happy life," he asserted, confirming what many had long thought, but philosophers had rarely accepted. Vulgar opinion at once imagined that the pleasure Epicurus had in mind involved a lot of money, sex, drink and debauchery (associations that survive in our use of the word 'Epicurean'). But true Epicureanism was more subtle. Epicurus led a very simple life, because after rational analysis, he had come to some striking conclusions about what actually made life pleasurable - and fortunately for those lacking a large income, it seemed that the essential ingredients of pleasure, however elusive, were not very expensive. The first ingredient was friendship. 'Of all the things that wisdom provides to help one live one's entire life in happiness, the greatest by far is the possession of friendship,' he wrote. So he bought a house near Athens where he lived in the company of congenial souls. The desire for riches should perhaps not always be understood as a simple hunger for a luxurious life, a more important motive might be the wish to be appreciated and treated nicely. We may seek a fortune for no greater reason than to secure the respect and attention of people who would otherwise look straight through us. Epicurus, discerning our underlying need, recognised that a handful of true friends could deliver the love and respect that even a fortune may not. Epicurus and his friends located a second secret of happiness: freedom. In order not to have to work for people they didn't like and answer to potentially humiliating whims, they removed themselves from employment in the commercial world of Athens ('We must free ourselves from the prison of everyday affairs and politics'), and began what could best have been described as a commune, accepting a simpler way of life in exchange for independence. They would have less money, but would never again have to follow the commands of odious superiors. The third ingredient of happiness was, in Epicurus's view, to lead an examined life. Epicurus was concerned that he and his friends learn to analyse their anxieties about money, illness, death and the supernatural. There are few better remedies for anxiety than thought. In writing a problem down or airing it in conversation we let its essential aspects emerge. And by knowing its character, we remove, if not the problem itself, then its secondary, aggravating characteristics: confusion, displacement, surprise. Wealth is of course unlikely ever to make anyone miserable. But the crux of Epicurus's argument is that if we have money without friends, freedom and an analysed life, we will never be truly happy. And if we have them, but are missing the fortune, we will never be unhappy.
Alain de Botton
When empathy makes us feel pain, the reaction is often a desire to escape. Jonathan Glover tells of a woman who lived near the death camps in Nazi Germany and who could easily see atrocities from her house, such as prisoners being shot and left to die. She wrote an angry letter: “One is often an unwilling witness to such outrages. I am anyway sickly and such a sight makes such a demand on my nerves that in the long run I cannot bear this. I request that it be arranged that such inhuman deeds be discontinued, or else be done where one does not see it.” She was definitely suffering from seeing the treatment of the prisoners, but it didn’t motivate her to want to save them: She would be satisfied if she could have this suffering continue out of her sight.
Paul Bloom (Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion)
Why is a prisoner’s motivation to earn a degree so that he can return to his family sooner viewed more negatively than a campus student’s motivation to earn a degree so he can make more money?
Laura Bates (Shakespeare Saved My Life: Ten Years in Solitary with the Bard)
Outside of your relationship with God, the most important relationship you can have is with yourself. I don’t mean that we are to spend all our time focused on me, me, me to the exclusion of others. Instead, I mean that we must be healthy internally—emotionally and spiritually—in order to create healthy relationships with others. Motivational pep talks and techniques for achieving success are useless if a person is weighed down by guilt, shame, depression, rejection, bitterness, or crushed self-esteem. Countless marriages land on the rocks of divorce because unhealthy people marry thinking that marriage, or their spouse, will make them whole. Wrong. If you’re not a healthy single person you won’t be a healthy married person. Part of God’s purpose for every human life is wholeness and health. I love the words of Jesus in John 10:10: “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.” God knows we are the walking wounded in this world and He wants the opportunity to remove everything that limits us and heal every wound from which we suffer. Some wonder why God doesn’t just “fix” us automatically so we can get on with life. It’s because He wants our wounds to be our tutors to lead us to Him. Pain is a wonderful motivator and teacher! When the great Russian intellectual Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was released from the horrible Siberian work camp to which he was sent by Joseph Stalin, he said, “Thank you, prison!” It was the pain and suffering he endured that caused his eyes to be opened to the reality of the God of his childhood, to embrace his God anew in a personal way. When we are able to say thank you to the pain we have endured, we know we are ready to fulfill our purpose in life. When we resist the pain life brings us, all of our energy goes into resistance and we have none left for the pursuit of our purpose. It is the better part of wisdom to let pain do its work and shape us as it will. We will be wiser, deeper, and more productive in the long run. There is a great promise in the New Testament that says God comes to us to comfort us so we can turn around and comfort those who are hurting with the comfort we have received from Him (see 2 Corinthians 1:3–4). Make yourself available to God and to those who suffer. A large part of our own healing comes when we reach out with compassion to others.
Zig Ziglar (Better Than Good: Creating a Life You Can't Wait to Live)
At least chemists can turn to analysis; sufferers from an unknown disease can call in a doctor. And criminal cases are more or less clarified by the examining magistrate. But the disconcerting actions of our fellow-men rarely reveal their motives.
Marcel Proust (The Prisoner: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 5 (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition))
the rich seem to believe that for the poor and struggling, only the prospects of continued poverty and struggle could possibly motivate them to hard work and success. If people are poor, then they must not be poor enough, on this rendering, for if they were, surely they would have gotten sufficiently motivated so as to not be poor any more. Make no mistake; this is the thinking of the sadist, akin to those who say we should make prisons as awful as possible so as to deter people from committing crime.
Tim Wise (Under the Affluence: Shaming the Poor, Praising the Rich and Sacrificing the Future of America (City Lights Open Media))
And, until the pain of remaining the same is worse than the resistance of change, you will remain the same, defeated, dejected, frustrated and unable to move on or see opportunities in front of you. You remain the prisoner of the collective idea as opposed to your own.
Itayi Garande (Reconditioning: Change your life in one minute)
If your mind is in chains, nothing can free you. If your mind is free, nothing can enslave you. You can't become anyone's prisoner before becoming your own prisoner first, -Emit Eht Emit Eht, Ratna Srivastava, Philosophy, Life, wisdom, intelligence, inspirational, motivational,
Ratna Srivastava (Emit Eht)
Praising God with a pure heart means we must let God cleanse our hearts from impure motives and hidden designs. We have to experience the dying to self so that we can live again in Christ in newness of mind and spirit. Dying to self is a progressive journey, and I have come to believe it is traveled only through praise.
Merlin R. Carothers (Prison To Praise)
I begin to understand that failure is its own reward. It is in the effort to close the distance between the work imagined and the work achieved wherein it is to be found that the ceaseless labor is the freedom of play, that what's at stake isn't a reflection in the mirror of fame but the escape from the prison of the self.
Lewis H. Lapham
Be honest with yourself. You were at your lowest and broken down. You were unsure and lost hope. You were hiding your fears until you showed them on your sleeve. You felt like everything and everyone was the hammer and you were the nail as they were beating down on you, and it was never-ending. Their empty threats had you scared and you were always running because your weakness was exposed. You were their prey. You didn’t know who to believe because of their mixed signals. You might not see it now, but you are stronger than you can ever imagine. You cannot become comfortable in your pain. You have to let the pain that you feel turn you into a rose without thorns. There are sixteen pieces on the chessboard. The king is the most important piece, but the difference is that the queen is the most powerful piece! You are a queen, you can maneuver around your opponents; they do not have the power over your life, your mind or soul. You might think you’ve been a prisoner, but that is your past’. Look in the now and work your way to how you want your future to be. Exercise your thoughts into a pattern of letting go, and think positively about more of what you want than what you do not want. Queen! You are a queen! As a matter of fact, you are the queen! Act as if you know it! You are powerful, determined, strong, and you can make the biggest and most extravagant move and put it into action. Lights, camera, strike a pose and own it! It is yours to own! Yes, you loved and loved so much. You also lost as well, but you lost hurt, pain, agony, and confusion. You’ve lost interest in wanting to know answers to unanswered questions. You’ve lost the willingness to give a shit about what others think. You’ve surrendered to being fine, that you cannot change the things you have no control over. You’ve lost a lot, but you’ve gained closure. You are now balanced, centered, focused, and filled with peace surrounding you in your heart, mind, body, and soul. Your pride was hurt, but you would rather walk alone and be more willing to give and learn more about the queen you are. You lost yourself in the process, but the more you learn about the new you, the more you will be so much in love with yourself. The more you learn about the new you, the more you will know your worth. The more you learn about the new you, the happier you are going to be, and this time around you will be smiling inside and out! The dots are now connecting. You feel alive! You know now that all is not lost. Now that you’ve cut the cord it is time to give your heart a second chance at loving yourself. Silence your mind. Take a deep breath and close your eyes. As you open your eyes, look at your reflection in the mirror. Aren’t you beautiful, Queen? Embrace who you are. Smile, laugh, welcome the new you and say, “My world is just now beginning.
Charlena E. Jackson (A Woman's Love Is Never Good Enough)
He lowers his head and peers at me, meeting my eyes. “No. I can see the life you’ve lived in the depths of your eyes. You are no fool, and you are not ignorant. Perhaps you didn’t learn how to waltz or play the piano, but those are things the rich do merely to fill their time. They aren’t important and they mean nothing. You’ve lived, Lor. You must have experienced so many terrible things in that prison.
Nisha J. Tuli (Trial of the Sun Queen (Artefacts of Ouranos, #1))
Give them glory in your death or in your killing". The guard's sentiment halted me for a moment, my gaze snapping to the fae. For the first time, I really noticed him. The horse-shifter, Zander, stood there, his chocolate brown eyes staring into mine. "Let their energy and your fear feed you, not starve you." His gaze remained intensely on me. Meaningful. "Use your head, find weapons in anything. Be the one who prevails.
Stacey Marie Brown (Savage Lands (Savage Lands, #1))
His oratorical baritone was raspy and supercilious under the strain. “You say you are not interested,” he told Wolfe, “in the factors of means and opportunity. The motive is palpable for all of us, but it is also palpable that Miss Duday is biased by animus. She cannot support her statement that after June thirtieth my income from the corporation would have ceased. I deny that Miss Eads intended to take any action so ill advised and irresponsible.
Rex Stout (Prisoner's Base (Nero Wolfe, #21))
Today my father still sits [in] prison. But what about all of us in our own prisons? For many of us, that's what we choose. There might not be metal bars or orange jumpsuits, but we keep ourselves locked in the prison of other people's expectations. Or we look across the street and put ourselves in the prison of wanting what those people over there have. We imprison ourselves in debt. We stay in our prisons because they're comfortable and don't challenge us.
Caylin Louis Moore (A Dream Too Big: The Story of an Improbable Journey from Compton to Oxford)
Any attempt at fighting the camp's psychopathological influence on the prisoner by psychotherapeutic or psycho-hygienic methods had to aim at giving him inner strength by pointing out to him a future goal to which he could look forward. Instinctively some of the prisoners attempted to find one on their own. It is a peculiarity of man that he can only live by looking to the future-sub specie aeternitatis. And this is his salvation in the most difficult moments of his existence, although he sometimes has to force his mind to the task.
Viktor E. Frankl (Man’s Search for Meaning)
When I got to know Mandela better, he explained that as a young man he had a quick temper. In prison he learned to control his emotions in order to survive. His years in jail had given him the time and motivation to look deeply into his own heart and to deal with the pain he found. He reminded me that gratitude and forgiveness, which often result from pain and suffering, require tremendous discipline. The day his imprisonment ended, he told me, “as I walked out the door toward the gate that would lead to my freedom, I knew if I didn’t leave my bitterness and hatred behind, I’d still be in prison.
Hillary Rodham Clinton (Living History)
a ring of jailhouse informants-- or 'snitches'--... allegedly received lenient sentences as well as food, drugs, sex and special privileges from detectives... It's not difficult to imahine why a prisoner-informant would lie about overhearing a confession when it means real material benefits... [and] prosecutors are often motivated to make those informants sound believable to a judge. Testimony from a single jailhouse informant is enough to convict a person for a charge as serious as murder... [Snitch] testimony [is] the leading cause of wrongful convictions in US capital cases." -- Aaron Miguel Cantu
Maya Schenwar (Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? Police Violence and Resistance in the United States)
Which brings me to one more thing about the Sheridan FCI [prison]. After you make it through the metal detector, you re stamped on the flesh above your right thumb with ink visible only in the black light of the prison checkpoints. Then you wait in a holding area like a farm animal before the next set of computer-locked double doors, and in this space, there are two things: a plaque celebrating the FCI Employee of the Month, and a full-length mirror with the message This is the image you will present today. Redressing, I always wondered whether this prop with its quasi motivational message was intended for us, the visitors of felons, or for would-be employees of the month. Perhaps both.
Jill Christman (Darkroom: A Family Exposure)
DETECTIVE FRANK GEYER WAS A big man with a pleasant, earnest face, a large walrus mustache, and a new gravity in his gaze and demeanor. He was one of Philadelphia’s top detectives and had been a member of the force for twenty years, during which time he had investigated some two hundred killings. He knew murder and its unchanging templates. Husbands killed wives, wives killed husbands, and the poor killed one another, always for the usual motives of money, jealousy, passion, and love. Rarely did a murder involve the mysterious elements of dime novels and mystery stories. From the start, however, Geyer’s current assignment—it was now June 1895—had veered from the ordinary. One unusual aspect was that the suspect already was in custody, arrested seven months earlier for insurance fraud and now incarcerated in Philadelphia’s Moyamensing Prison
Erik Larson (The Devil in the White City)
We should notice how remarkable it is that so many of the central characters in the story of the New Testament are arrested. John the Baptist, Jesus, all of the twelve disciples, Paul and his companions, John of Patmos—they all end up in jail at some point. We even have a genre of the New Testament known as “the prison epistles.”  This should alert us to the truth that the gospel is uncomfortably political. The gospel of the kingdom is not partisan—it will not serve the partisan interests of a particular political party—but it is intensely political. It’s political because it poses a direct challenge to the principalities and powers and the way the world is arranged. What Herod and the rest of the ruling elite got right about the message of John the Baptist and Jesus of Nazareth was that it carried enormous political implications—political implications that motivated them to attack the kingdom of heaven.
Brian Zahnd (Postcards from Babylon: The Church In American Exile)
While the Texas prison officials remained in the dark about what was going on, they were fortunate that William and Danny had benign motives. Imagine what havoc the two might have caused; it would have been child's play for these guys to develop a scheme for obtaining money or property from unsuspecting victims. The Internet had become their university and playground. Learning how to run scams against individuals or break in to corporate sites would have been a cinch; teenagers and preteens learn these methods every day from the hacker sites and elsewhere on the Web. And as prisoners, Danny and William had all the time in the world. Maybe there's a lesson here: Two convicted murderers, but that didn't mean they were scum, rotten to the core. They were cheaters who hacked their way onto the Internet illegally, but that didn't mean they were willing to victimize innocent people or naively insecure companies.
Kevin D. Mitnick (The Art of Intrusion: The Real Stories Behind the Exploits of Hackers, Intruders and Deceivers)
It should be said that all these years, in all the Special Camps, orthodox Soviet citizens, without even consulting each other, unanimously condemned the massacre of the stoolies, or any attempt by prisoners to fight for their rights. We need not put this down to sordid motives (though quite a few of the orthodox were compromised by their work for the godfather) since we can fully explain it by their theoretical views. They accepted all forms of repression and extermination, even wholesale, provided they came from above—as a manifestation of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Even impulsive and uncoordinated actions of the same kind but from below were regarded as banditry, and what is more, in its "Banderist" form (among the loyalists you would never get one to admit the right of the Ukraine to secede, because to do so was bourgeois nationalism). The refusal of the katorzhane to be slave laborers, their indignation about window bars and shootings, depressed and frightened the docile camp Communists.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books V-VII)
This unfinished play follows Myrrhina, an Alexandrian noblewoman, who travels to the mountains to tempt Honorius, a Christian hermit, away from goodness with her beauty and wealth. After they talk, he decides to return to sin in Alexandria, while she discovers religion and chooses to remain in the desert. Wilde had begun work on the play in 1894, between writing Salomé and The Importance of Being Earnest, but he was unable to complete it before his trial and imprisonment. He considered revisiting the play in 1897 after his release from prison, but he then lacked motivation for literary work, although during his imprisonment, it was much on his mind and he had described it in a letter to a friend as one among his “beautiful coloured, musical things”. Before his imprisonment, the fragments had been entrusted to Mrs. Leverson, who in 1897 went to Paris on purpose to restore the manuscript to the author. However, Wilde accidently left the papers in a taxi cab and now only a portion of a first draft survives.
Oscar Wilde (Delphi Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Illustrated))
The liberal international human rights community often defines political internees as those incarcerated for their beliefs, not necessarily their actions. While such instances abound, they are not the only or even the best examples of politically motivated incarceration. Whether someone “did it” ought not to determine fully who receives our support. Instead, political prisoners are best conceived as active participants in resistance movements. Thus the central issue for thinking about political prisoners is not whether they “did it” but what movements did they come from and what are the broader circumstances surrounding their arrest. Most of those incarcerated participated in radical movements seeking fundamental overhauls of structures of power. (...) Political prisoners emerged from movements seeking to stop, to overturn, to develop alternatives to state and extralegal violence of the system. All of America’s political internees did something; some resisted with force, some put their bodies on the line, and others used words and propagated ideas the state deemed too powerful to let slide as just so much free speech. The issue of political prisoners is less one of “innocence” than of defending people’s ability and capacity to resist.
Dan Berger (The Struggle Within: Prisons, Political Prisoners, and Mass Movements in the United States)
would go back to the body dump site. The prison interviews helped us see and understand the wide variety of motivation and behavior among serial killers and rapists. But we saw some striking common denominators as well. Most of them come from broken or dysfunctional homes. They’re generally products of some type of abuse, whether it’s physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, or a combination. We tend to see at a very early age the formation of what we refer to as the “homicidal triangle” or “homicidal triad.” This includes enuresis—or bed-wetting—at an inappropriate age, starting fires, and cruelty to small animals or other children. Very often, we found, at least two of these three traits were present, if not all three. By the time we see his first serious crime, he’s generally somewhere in his early to mid-twenties. He has low self-esteem and blames the rest of the world for his situation. He already has a bad track record, whether he’s been caught at it or not. It may be breaking and entering, it may have been rape or rape attempts. You may see a dishonorable discharge from the military, since these types tend to have a real problem with any type of authority. Throughout their lives, they believe that they’ve been victims: they’ve been manipulated, they’ve been dominated, they’ve been controlled by others. But here, in this one situation, fueled by fantasy, this inadequate, ineffectual nobody can manipulate and dominate a victim of his own; he can be in control. He can orchestrate whatever he wants to do to the victim. He can decide whether this victim should live or die, how the victim should die. It’s up to him; he’s finally calling the shots.
John E. Douglas (Journey Into Darkness (Mindhunter #2))
For the disciplined man, as for the true believer, no detail is unimportant, but not so much for the meaning that it conceals within it as for the hold it provides for the power that wishes to seize it. Characteristic is the great hymn to the 'little things' and to their eternal importance, sung by Jean Baptiste de La Salle, in his "Traité sur les obligations des freres des Ecoles chretienne" (Treaty on the obligations of the Brothers of the Christian Schools). The mystique of the everyday is joined here with the discipline of the minute. 'How dangerous it is to neglect little things. It is a very consoling reflection for a soul like mine, little disposed to great actions, to think that fidelity to little things may, by an imperceptible progress, raise us to the most eminent sanctity: because little things lead to greater . . . Little things; it will be said, alas, my God, what can we do that is great for you, weak and mortal creatures that we are. Little things; if great things presented themselves would we perform them! Would we not think them beyond our strength! Little things; and if God accepts them and wishes to receive them as great things! Little things; has one ever felt this? Does one judge according to experience? Little things; one is certainly guilty, therefore, of seeing them as such, one refuses them! Little things; yet it is they that in the end have made great saints! Yes, little things; but great motives, great feelings, great fervour, great ardour, and consequently great merits, great treasures, great rewards! (La Salle). The meticulousness of the regulations, the fussiness of the inspections, the supervision of the smallest fragment of life and of the body - will soon provide, in the context of the school, the barracks, the hospital or the workshop, a laicized content, an economic or technical rationality for this mystical calculus of the infinitesimal and the infinite.
Michel Foucault (Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison)
That the life of Man is but a dream has been sensed by many a one, and I too am never free of the feeling. When I consider the restrictions that are placed on the active, inquiring energies of Man; when I see that all our efforts have no other result than to satisfy needs which in turn serve no purpose but to prolong our wretched existence, and then see that all our reassurance concerning the particular questions we probe is no more than dreamy resignation, since all we are doing is to paint our prison walls with colourful figures and bright views – all of this, Wilhelm, leaves me silent. I withdraw into myself, and discover a world, albeit a notional world of dark desire rather than one of actuality and vital strength. And everything swims before my senses, and I go my way in the world wearing the smile of the dreamer. All our learned teachers and educators are agreed that children do not know why they want what they want; but no one is willing to believe that adults too, like children, wander about this earth in a daze and, like children, do not know where they come from or where they are going, act as rarely as they do according to genuine motives, and are as thoroughly governed as they are by biscuits and cake and the rod. And yet it seems palpably clear to me. I gladly confess, since I know the reply you would want to make, that they are the happiest who, like children, live for the present moment, drag their dolls around and dress and undress them, and watchfully steal by the drawer where Mama has locked away the cake, and, when at last they get their hands on what they want, devour it with their cheeks crammed full and cry, ‘More!’ – They are happy creatures. And those others, who give pompous titles to their beggarly pursuits and even to their passions, and chalk them up as vast enterprises for the good and well-being of mankind, they too are happy. – It is all very well for those who can be like that! But he who humbly perceives where it is all leading, who sees how prettily the happy man makes an Eden of his garden, and how even the unhappy man goes willingly on his weary way, panting beneath his burden, and that all are equally interested in seeing the light of the sun for one minute more – he indeed will be silent, and will create a world from within for himself, and be happy because he is a man. And then, confined as he may be, he none the less still preserves in his heart the sweet sensation of freedom, and the knowledge he can quit this prison whenever he wishes.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (The Sorrows of Young Werther)
A fierce battle was taking place at Tobruk, and nothing thrilled him more than spirited warfare and the prospect of military glory. He stayed up until three-thirty, in high spirits, “laughing, chaffing and alternating business with conversation,” wrote Colville. One by one his official guests, including Anthony Eden, gave up and went to bed. Churchill, however, continued to hold forth, his audience reduced to only Colville and Mary’s potential suitor, Eric Duncannon. Mary by this point had retired to the Prison Room, aware that the next day held the potential to change her life forever. — IN BERLIN, MEANWHILE, HITLER and Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels joked about a newly published English biography of Churchill that revealed many of his idiosyncrasies, including his penchant for wearing pink silk underwear, working in the bathtub, and drinking throughout the day. “He dictates messages in the bath or in his underpants; a startling image which the Führer finds hugely amusing,” Goebbels wrote in his diary on Saturday. “He sees the English Empire as slowly disintegrating. Not much will be salvageable.” — ON SUNDAY MORNING, a low-grade anxiety colored the Cromwellian reaches of Chequers. Today, it seemed, would be the day Eric Duncannon proposed to Mary, and no one other than Mary was happy about it. Even she, however, was not wholly at ease with the idea. She was eighteen years old and had never had a romantic relationship, let alone been seriously courted. The prospect of betrothal left her feeling emotionally roiled, though it did add a certain piquancy to the day. New guests arrived: Sarah Churchill, the Prof, and Churchill’s twenty-year-old niece, Clarissa Spencer-Churchill—“looking quite beautiful,” Colville noted. She was accompanied by Captain Alan Hillgarth, a raffishly handsome novelist and self-styled adventurer now serving as naval attaché in Madrid, where he ran intelligence operations; some of these were engineered with the help of a lieutenant on his staff, Ian Fleming, who later credited Captain Hillgarth as being one of the inspirations for James Bond. “It was obvious,” Colville wrote, “that Eric was expected to make advances to Mary and that the prospect was viewed with nervous pleasure by Mary, with approbation by Moyra, with dislike by Mrs. C. and with amusement by Clarissa.” Churchill expressed little interest. After lunch, Mary and the others walked into the rose garden, while Colville showed Churchill telegrams about the situation in Iraq. The day was sunny and warm, a nice change from the recent stretch of cold. Soon, to Colville’s mystification, Eric and Clarissa set off on a long walk over the grounds by themselves, leaving Mary behind. “His motives,” Colville wrote, “were either Clarissa’s attraction, which she did not attempt to keep in the background, or else the belief that it was good policy to arouse Mary’s jealousy.” After the walk, and after Clarissa and Captain Hillgarth had left, Eric took a nap, with the apparent intention (as Colville
Erik Larson (The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz)
Everywhere you look with this young lady, there’s a purity of motivation,” Shultz told him. “I mean she really is trying to make the world better, and this is her way of doing it.” Mattis went out of his way to praise her integrity. “She has probably one of the most mature and well-honed sense of ethics—personal ethics, managerial ethics, business ethics, medical ethics that I’ve ever heard articulated,” the retired general gushed. Parloff didn’t end up using those quotes in his article, but the ringing endorsements he heard in interview after interview from the luminaries on Theranos’s board gave him confidence that Elizabeth was the real deal. He also liked to think of himself as a pretty good judge of character. After all, he’d dealt with his share of dishonest people over the years, having worked in a prison during law school and later writing at length about such fraudsters as the carpet-cleaning entrepreneur Barry Minkow and the lawyer Marc Dreier, both of whom went to prison for masterminding Ponzi schemes. Sure, Elizabeth had a secretive streak when it came to discussing certain specifics about her company, but he found her for the most part to be genuine and sincere. Since his angle was no longer the patent case, he didn’t bother to reach out to the Fuiszes. — WHEN PARLOFF’S COVER STORY was published in the June 12, 2014, issue of Fortune, it vaulted Elizabeth to instant stardom. Her Journal interview had gotten some notice and there had also been a piece in Wired, but there was nothing like a magazine cover to grab people’s attention. Especially when that cover featured an attractive young woman wearing a black turtleneck, dark mascara around her piercing blue eyes, and bright red lipstick next to the catchy headline “THIS CEO IS OUT FOR BLOOD.” The story disclosed Theranos’s valuation for the first time as well as the fact that Elizabeth owned more than half of the company. There was also the now-familiar comparison to Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. This time it came not from George Shultz but from her old Stanford professor Channing Robertson. (Had Parloff read Robertson’s testimony in the Fuisz trial, he would have learned that Theranos was paying him $500,000 a year, ostensibly as a consultant.) Parloff also included a passage about Elizabeth’s phobia of needles—a detail that would be repeated over and over in the ensuing flurry of coverage his story unleashed and become central to her myth. When the editors at Forbes saw the Fortune article, they immediately assigned reporters to confirm the company’s valuation and the size of Elizabeth’s ownership stake and ran a story about her in their next issue. Under the headline “Bloody Amazing,” the article pronounced her “the youngest woman to become a self-made billionaire.” Two months later, she graced one of the covers of the magazine’s annual Forbes 400 issue on the richest people in America. More fawning stories followed in USA Today, Inc., Fast Company, and Glamour, along with segments on NPR, Fox Business, CNBC, CNN, and CBS News. With the explosion of media coverage came invitations to numerous conferences and a cascade of accolades. Elizabeth became the youngest person to win the Horatio Alger Award. Time magazine named her one of the one hundred most influential people in the world. President Obama appointed her a U.S. ambassador for global entrepreneurship, and Harvard Medical School invited her to join its prestigious board of fellows.
John Carreyrou (Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup)
exchange of “hostages” unjustly held in Western prisons. The motive changes according to circumstance. Sometimes the unlucky
Anonymous
Consider the case of two young men—Jeremy Strohmeyer and David Cash Jr.—who walked into a Nevada casino in 1988. Strohmeyer followed a seven-year-old girl into the women’s restroom and molested and murdered her. The wrongness of Strohmeyer’s act is obvious from both a moral and a legal perspective. But what about Cash, who was with Strohmeyer in the restroom, halfheartedly tried to get him to stop, and then gave up and went for a walk? As he later said, he wasn’t going “to lose sleep over somebody else’s problems.” Strohmeyer went to prison, but Cash didn’t, since it was not illegal in Nevada to fail to stop a crime from happening. Still, there was a sense on the part of many that he had done something wrong. There were demonstrations against him at his university and demands that he be expelled. (Indeed, legislators changed the law in Nevada in response to this very case, bringing it more in line with public sentiment.) Cash is now being stalked on the Internet; people report on his whereabouts, hoping to ruin his prospects for getting a job and finding friends, wishing to destroy his life, even though they were personally unaffected by his failure to act. This illustrates how much moral transgressions matter to us. We don’t merely observe that Cash is a bad guy; some of us are motivated to make him suffer.
Anonymous
We must free ourselves from this prison that restricts our personal desires by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
Dee Waldeck
Her thoughts, however, resembled those of a fish – something seen floating in a tank, brooding, self-absorbed, frigid, moving solemnly forward to its object or veering slowly sideways without fully conscious motivation. She had been born, apparently, without any natural predilection towards thought or action, and the circumstances of her early life had seemed to render both unnecessary.... When Netta awoke this morning she was aware that she was feeling decidedly sick and giddy, that she had a ‘head’: but she did not relate her ‘head’ to the night before – to the fact that she had got drunk. Nor was she capable of connecting her present feeling of illness with the future: she had no idea of preventing a recurrence of such a feeling by making an attempt not to get so drunk again. She simply suffered it in a vacuum – as a habitual crook, who spends his entire life in and out of jail, suffers prison bars.... The same dull, fish-like style of thought which she brought to bear on the local exigencies of-life characterized her attitude to her existence generally. She was not without ambitions; she was steering a course of a sort; but dimly, without any fervour or coherence. She had at one time hoped to make good at films: she still vaguely hoped to do so: but she was unable to relate this ambition with the labour requisite for its maturing. She expected it to come to her as all things had come to her hitherto, by virtue of the stationary magnetism of her physical beauty. That was how she had got whatever jobs she had in the past, and that was how her frigid, inelastic mind conceived of getting them in the future.
Patrick Hamilton (Hangover Square)
Prison educators thought that Manson might benefit from a four-week course influenced by Dale Carnegie’s famous book, How to Win Friends and Influence People. The Carnegie Method distills all human endeavors down to two motivating factors: sexual desire and the desire for greatness. This method became like a religion to Manson. Never before had any worldview resonated so deeply with Manson, who himself desired pure admiration from those around him, particularly women. These two distinct but connected sources—the pimps of Terminal Island and Dale Carnegie—provided Manson with clear instructions on how to use sex as a tool and how to exert control over women.
Hourly History (Charles Manson: A Life From Beginning to End (Biographies of Criminals))
James is “helping motivate kids in trouble to get jobs and not hang on the streets. I never wanted to make it to prison. The question is, do I want to change?” And then, answering his own question, Tim added, “My answer is yes because it’s time to let my light shine.
Guideposts (Daily Guideposts 2018: A Spirit-Lifting Devotional)
Has God Given You a Vision? ‘Write the vision and make it plain … that he may run who reads it.’ Habakkuk 2:2 When God gives you a vision for your life, write it down, keep it before you at all times and run with it. You say, ‘But I see no way for it to come to pass.’ The Bible says, ‘The vision is yet for an appointed time … wait for it; because it will surely come’ (Habakuk 2 v. 3 NKJV). You may not know how to get from where you are right now to where the vision will ultimately take you - but God does. So ask Him to reveal the next step to you. Whether you’re in prison like Joseph, in a soup kitchen in the inner city, or at home taking care of small children, God will fulfil the vision He placed in your heart. The more you see yourself leading in the boardroom, launching your own business, serving in ministry, writing your first book, or helping others through your gifts, the sooner it’ll become a reality.
Patience Johnson (Why Does an Orderly God Allow Disorder)
This verse just came to my mind yesterday while sitting in the train... ‘Pursue … overtake … and … recover all.’ 1 Samuel 30:8 When King David and his men returned home from battle, they discovered that the Amalekites had burned their homes to the ground and taken their families prisoner. They were devastated. They wept until they’d no tears left. Then God spoke to them and said, ‘Pursue … overtake … and … recover all.’ And with His help they did! So no matter how bad your situation looks right now, don’t give up. Cry if you have to, then dry your tears and go out in God’s strength and take back what the Enemy has stolen from you. If necessary, take it an inch at a time, drawing on His strength and not your own. Paul writes: ‘Let us not lose heart and grow weary and faint in acting nobly and doing right, for in due time and at the appointed season we shall reap, if we do not loosen and relax our courage and faint’ (Galatians 6:9 AMP Classic Edition). God won’t quit on you, so don’t quit on Him! He has promised in His Word: ‘When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and when you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep over you. When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned; the flames will not set you ablaze. For I am the LORD your God’ (Isaiah 43:2-3 NIV 2011 Edition). Don’t give up - go through! It’s easy to quit, but it takes faith to go through. When your faith honours God, He honours your faith! And with Him on your side you’ll come out stronger than you were when you went in. So the word for you today is: ‘Pursue … overtake … and … recover all.
Patience Johnson (Why Does an Orderly God Allow Disorder)
Prisoners resent being questioned about crime motives. That is why psychiatry and psychological treatment in prisons have accomplished little with prisoners. The trouble is that we expect too much of the man in prison. We want him to be better than we are, or hope to be. On a par with Caesar's wife--beyond suspicion. Let us be frank about it. We are mortally afraid of him.
Lewis E. Lawes (Twenty Thousand Years In Sing Sing)
You really need to be careful In taking advice, being influenced, or following and supporting someone on Social Media. Choose to double-check, verify, and apply logic and reasonable thinking in everything. It is because you don’t know the state of mind, intentions, situation, or conditions of the person posting. They might be posting from prison, psychiatric hospital or dark place. They might be bots, egocentric, pessimists, greedy, dishonest, manipulative, narcissistic, vindictive, sarcastic, toxic, selfish, hostile, pedophiles, scammers, murderers, insane, minors, catfish or psychopaths. They might have bipolar disorder. Because they have a large number of followers or they are too vocal it doesn’t mean you should listen and take everything they say.
D.J. Kyos
If I hadn't encountered the trials and hadn't experienced the soul-destroying agony that almost put me in the grave, I would never have collided with destiny.
Abigail Damoah (She is Risen: From Destitute to Destiny: My Fight For Freedom in an American Prison)
HH Dalai Lama: Some forms of meditation are very difficult. One of my close friends was a very good meditator who attempted to cultivate single-pointedness of mind. He had the experience of spending a few years in a Chinese prison, and he told me that the meditation was actually harder than being a prisoner. The point is that he had to be constantly aware and attentive without losing his attention even for a moment. A constant vigilance was required. One factor that needs to be taken into account is the intensity and quality of the meditator’s motivation. In the traditional Buddhist context, meditators are highly motivated individuals who have a deep appreciation of the framework of the Buddhist path and an understanding of its causes and effects: If I do this, this will happen. They understand the nature of the path and its culmination. There is a deep recognition that the fulfillment of one’s aspiration for happiness really lies in the transformation of one’s undisciplined state to a more disciplined state of mind. These individuals take into account all of this context, so when they engage in meditation, they have a tremendous sense of dedication, joy, a very strong motivation, and sustained enthusiasm. But if you just tell a child, with no context at all, to start meditating, there will be no incentive, no inspiration. Robert, you made the comment that in small doses, stress can actually raise dopamine levels, which we assume corresponds in the rat to a heightened sense of well-being or pleasure. I wonder whether there might be an analogue in meditation, specifically in the training of single-pointed attention, or samadhi, which is not uniquely Buddhist. As one trains incrementally in developing attention, a quality arises that is described as suppleness or malleability of the body and mind, and is often conjoined with a sense of well-being, perhaps even bliss. It happens very strongly when one achieves a high state of samadhi, but even incrementally along the path, there are many surges of this type of malleability together with a kind of bliss. This may be an interesting area of research, to see from the neurophysiological perspective what some of the unexpected events are that come out of such attentional training.
Jon Kabat-Zinn (The Mind's Own Physician: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama on the Healing Power of Meditation)
is also a book about animals as animals. Some scientists study the senses of other animals to better understand ourselves, using exceptional creatures like electric fish, bats, and owls as “model organisms” for exploring how our own sensory systems work. Others reverse-engineer animal senses to create new technologies: Lobster eyes have inspired space telescopes, the ears of a parasitic fly have influenced hearing aids, and military sonar has been honed by work on dolphin sonar. These are both reasonable motivations. I’m not interested in either. Animals are not just stand-ins for humans or fodder for brainstorming sessions. They have worth in themselves. We’ll explore their senses to better understand their lives. “They move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear,” wrote the American naturalist Henry Beston. “They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.
Ed Yong (An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us)
privatization of prisons in the United States highlights the potential dangers of this approach. Private prisons operate on a for-profit basis, incentivizing cost-cutting measures that often compromise safety and rehabilitation programs. Studies have shown that private prisons tend to have higher rates of violence and poorer conditions compared to public facilities. Moreover, the profit motive can lead to policies that increase incarceration rates, exacerbating issues of mass incarceration and social injustice.
Carl Young (Project 2025: Exposing the Hidden Dangers of the Radical Agenda for Everyday Americans (Project 2025 Blueprints))
Why does taking part in a scared-straight program make kids more likely to commit crimes? The story-editing approach suggests an answer, by asking how these programs change kids’ interpretations of why they should stay out of trouble. The problem is that the programs provide kids with external motivation—wanting to avoid the horrors of prison—that can, paradoxically, undermine their internal motivation to take the straight path. A number of years ago, Daniel Lassiter and I demonstrated this phenomenon in a two-session experiment with college students.
Timothy D. Wilson (Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change)
The child fought the members’ (including his mother's) hands that restrained him, while the pastor, Ray Anthony Hemphill, pressed his knee against the boy's chest. After three weeks of meetings, the child quieted down, but when the 12th ceremony ceased, the boy could not be revived, because he had died of suffocation. Hemphill defended himself on the grounds that he was engaging in a religious practice to no avail, but his religious motivation seems to have softened the prosecutor's will. A jury convicted him of child abuse, and he was sentenced to a mere 30 months in prison and barred from performing exorcisms for 10 years without formal training in the practice.
Marci A. Hamilton (God vs. the Gavel: The Perils of Extreme Religious Liberty)
Anglos dominated the prisoner population in 1977 and did not lose their plurality until 1988. Meanwhile, absolute numbers grew across the board—with the total number of those incarcerated approximately doubling during each interval. African American prisoners surpassed all other groups in 1988, but by 1995, they had been overtaken by Latinos; however, Black people have the highest rate of incarceration of any racial/ethnic grouping in California, or, for that matter, in the United States (see also Bonczar and Beck 1997). TABLE 4 CDC PRISONER POPULATION BY RACE/ETHNICITY The structure of new laws, intersecting with the structure of the burgeoning relative surplus population, and the state’s concentrated use of criminal laws in the Southland, produced a remarkable racial and ethnic shift in the prison population. Los Angeles is the primary county of commitment. Most prisoners are modestly educated men in the prime of life: 88 percent are between 19 and 44 years old. Less than 45 percent graduated from high school or read at the ninth-grade level; one in four is functionally illiterate. And, finally, the percentage of prisoners who worked six months or longer for the same employer immediately before being taken into custody has declined, from 54.5 percent in 1982 to 44 percent in 2000 (CDC, Characteristics of Population, various years). TABLE 5 CDC COMMITMENTS BY CONTROLLING OFFENSE (%) At the bottom of the first and subsequent waves of new criminal legislation lurked a key contradiction. On the one hand, the political rhetoric, produced and reproduced in the media, concentrated on the need for laws and prisons to control violence. “Crime” and “violence” seemed to be identical. However, as table 5 shows, there was a significant shift in the controlling (or most serious) offenses for those committed to the CDC, from a preponderance of violent offenses in 1980 to nonviolent crimes in 1995. More to the point, the controlling offenses for more than half of 1995’s commitments were nonviolent crimes of illness or of illegal income producing activity: drug use, drug sales, burglary, motor vehicle theft. The outcome of the first two years of California’s broadly written “three strikes” law presents a similar picture: in the period March 1994–January 1996, 15 percent of controlling offenses were violent crimes, 31 percent were drug offenses, and 41 percent were crimes against property (N = 15,839) (Christoper Davis et al. 1996). The relative surplus population comes into focus in these numbers. In 1996, 43 percent of third-strike prisoners were Black, 32.4 percent Latino, and 24.6 percent Anglo. The deliberate intensification of surveillance and arrest in certain areas, combined with novel crimes of status, drops the weight of these numbers into particular places. The chair of the State Task Force on Youth Gang Violence expressed the overlap between presumptions of violence and the exigencies of everyday reproduction when he wrote: “We are talking about well-organized, drug-dealing, dangerously armed and profit-motivated young hoodlums who are engaged in the vicious crimes of murder, rape, robbery, extortion and kidnapping as a means of making a living” (Philibosian 1986: ix; emphasis added).
Ruth Wilson Gilmore (Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (American Crossroads Book 21))
Joseph gradually gained the confidence of the keeper of the prison, and was finally entrusted with the charge of all the prisoners. It was the part he acted in the prison—the integrity of his daily life and his sympathy for those who were in trouble and distress—that opened the way for his future prosperity and honor. Every ray of light that we shed upon others is reflected upon ourselves. Every kind and sympathizing word spoken to the sorrowful, every act to relieve the oppressed, and every gift to the needy, if prompted by a right motive, will result in blessings to the giver. [219]
Ellen Gould White (Patriarchs and Prophets)
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CriminaloffenseBoa
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TerrySchrader
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Amanda Flowers
General Butler was invoking Blacks’ natural proclivity for violence and criminality to avoid punishment for the massacre he had carried out. But hardly any congressional investigators questioned his motive for expressing these racist ideas, which at the time were being codified by a prison doctor in Italy. Cesare Lombroso “proved” in 1876 that non-White men loved to kill, “mutilate the corpse, tear its flesh and drink its blood.” His Criminal Man gave birth to the discipline of criminology in 1876. Criminals were born, not bred, Lombroso said. He believed that born criminals emitted physical signs that could be studied, measured, and quantified, and that the “inability to blush”—and therefore, dark skin—had “always been considered the accompaniment of crime.” Black women, in their close “degree of differentiation from the male,” he claimed in The Female Offender in 1895, were the prototypical female criminals. As White terrorists brutalized, raped, and killed people in communities around the Black world, the first crop of Western criminologists were intent on giving criminals a Black face and the well-behaved citizen a White face. Lombroso’s student, Italian law professor Raffaele Garofalo, invented the term “criminology” (criminologia) in 1885. British physician Havelock Ellis popularized Lombroso in the English-speaking world, publishing a compendium of his writings in 1890.20
Ibram X. Kendi (Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America)
The people that loves God, do they also have troubles? Yes but the troubles never have them. They can have pain but pain can't have them. Paul was in prison but prison was not in him. Don't let what you have, have you. Have money and time but don't let them have you. Have good name and title but don't let name and title have you but let God get glory out of it.
Patience Johnson
When you are up in life your friends get to know who you are. When you are down in life you get to know who your friends are. #minoradjustments101
Michael L. Williams Jr. (I'm a Believer: I Am What I Am)
I was my turn to shake my head. No wonder I hadn't seen any bookshelves or DVDs in his bedroom. I shrugged. "Just a literary reference. Just one more thing, Jamie, you're not immortal and you don't sparkle in the sunlight, do you?" I thought Jamie was about to call the doctor back by the look on his face. "No?" "Okay, just checking." I sipped my coffee and read the documents which were full of legalese. They took about fourteen pages to tell me that I couldn't breathe a word of it to anyone or I would suffer dire consequences. It would have been much simpler and saved a tree or two had they simply written, I, the undersigned, will not breathe a word of this to anyone or you will throw me in prison.
Morgana Best (A Motive for Murder (Misty Sales #1))
Critics of correctional education say that prisoners are motivated only by the time cut. (In some states, they can reduce their sentence by a year or two by earning a degree.) I have two responses to that. One: Why is a prisoner’s motivation to earn a degree so that he can return to his family sooner viewed more negatively than a campus student’s motivation to earn a degree so he can make more money? And, two: What about the motivation of a prisoner, like Newton, who is serving a sentence of life with no possibility of parole?
Laura Bates (Shakespeare Saved My Life: Ten Years in Solitary with the Bard)
accommodate, within reason, the religious practices of workers and applicants unless they impose an “undue hardship” on the business. It is the latest in a line of Supreme Court cases that have elevated religious rights over secular interests, whether exercised by powerful corporations, government agencies or prison inmates. The majority opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia stressed two points that outline the role religion can have in the workplace. Employers must do more than handle religious practices in the same way they do secular ones, he wrote, because federal law gives faith-related expression “favored treatment, affirmatively obligating employers” to accommodate things they could otherwise refuse. Moreover, he wrote, an applicant or employee alleging religious discrimination doesn’t have to prove the employer was motivated by bias.
Anonymous
Once you sign up for a Spartan Race, once you tell all of your friends about it, you, too, are committed. To back out is to admit failure not only to yourself but also to others. This should motivate you to honor your commitment and show up at the starting line ready to race.
Joe De Sena (Spartan Up!: A Take-No-Prisoners Guide to Overcoming Obstacles and Achieving Peak Performance in Life)
prisons were built based on our third grade Iowa Basics test scores,
Mark O'Neal (Ulterior Motives)
The more we dig this world, the more prisoners we become
El Ca'Sophia M
If a religion asks one to kill another just because he or she follows not this ism, nor agrees with it; then, it's a hell-hole, worse than a prison. Run away, and far from it. As though your butt is on fire. And before you, yourself are imprisoned.
Fakeer Ishavardas
Trust His Perfect Plan You will show me the path of life; in Your presence is fullness of joy; at Your right hand are pleasures forevermore. Psalm 16:11 NKJV God has a plan for your life. He understands that plan as thoroughly and completely as He knows you. And, if you seek God’s will earnestly and prayerfully, He will make His plans known to you in His own time and in His own way. If you sincerely seek to live in accordance with God’s will for your life, you will live in accordance with His commandments. You will study God’s Word, and you will be watchful for His signs. Sometimes, God’s plans seem unmistakably clear to you. But other times, He may lead you through the wilderness before He directs you to the Promised Land. So be patient and keep seeking His will for your life. When you do, you’ll be amazed at the marvelous things that an all-powerful, all-knowing God can do. God in Christ is the author and finisher of my faith. He knows exactly what needs to happen in my life for my faith to grow. He designs the perfect program for me. Mary Morrison Suggs Obedience to God is our job. The results of that obedience are God’s. Elisabeth Elliot When the dream of our heart is one that God has planted there, a strange happiness flows into us. At that moment, all of the spiritual resources of the universe are released to help us. Our praying is then at one with the will of God and becomes a channel for the Creator’s purposes for us and our world. Catherine Marshall God has plans—not problems—for our lives. Before she died in the concentration camp in Ravensbruck, my sister Betsie said to me, “Corrie, your whole life has been a training for the work you are doing here in prison—and for the work you will do afterward.” Corrie ten Boom I’m convinced that there is nothing that can happen to me in this life that is not precisely designed by a sovereign Lord to give me the opportunity to learn to know Him. Elisabeth Elliot God has His reasons. He has His purposes. Ours is an intentional God, brimming over with motive and mission. He never does things capriciously or decides with the flip of a coin. Joni Eareckson Tada
Freeman Smith (Fifty Shades of Grace: Devotions Celebrating God's Unlimited Gift)
Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.
Reza Nazari (Memorable Quotes: From Top 50 Greatest Motivational Speakers of All Time)
Every time you are tempted to react in the same old way, ask if you want to be a prisoner of the past or a pioneer of the future.
Reza Nazari (Memorable Quotes: From Top 50 Greatest Motivational Speakers of All Time)
What Mr. Osborne did not see clearly was that prisoners are, actually, people who have quarreled with the law. That regardless of motivating forces or underlying causes prisons are communities of nonconformists.
Lewis E. Lawes (Twenty Thousand Years In Sing Sing)
The shadow demons (fears) you've been avoiding keep you stuck in a rut, a prisoner in your own life - it's time to break free and shine!
Sharon Kirstin (The Answers Within)
The pig is an instrument of neoslavery, to be hated and avoided; he is pushed to the front by the men who exercise the unnatural right over property. You’ve heard the patronizing shit about the thin blue line that protects property and the owners of property. The pigs are not protecting you, your home, and its contents. Recall they never found the TV set you lost in that burglary. They’re protecting the unnatural right of a few men to own the means of all of our subsistence. The pig is protecting the right of a few private individuals to own public property!! The pig is merely the gun, the tool, a mentally inanimate utensil. It is necessary to destroy the gun, but destroying the gun and sparing the hand that holds it will forever relegate us to a defensive action, hold our revolution in the doldrums, ultimately defeat us. The animal that holds the gun, that has loosed the pig of war on us, is a bitter-ender, an intractable, gluttonous vulture who must eat at our hearts to live. Midas-motivated, never satisfied, everything he touches will turn into shit! Slaying the shitty pig will have absolutely no healing effect at all, if we leave this vulture to touch someone else. Spare the hand that holds the gun and it will simply fashion another.
George L. Jackson (Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson)
know your enemy. Understand your enemy’s motivations. Know his friends. Discern his network of support. Don’t act against him unless you know you’ll be successful. Use the rest of these rules to get yourself to that point.
John Kiriakou (Doing Time Like A Spy: How the CIA Taught Me to Survive and Thrive in Prison)
Au centre de notre cerveau, les zones du système de récompense sont à la base du comportement humain. Aire tegmentale ventrale, noyau accumbens, pallidum, hypothalamus, cortex préfrontal. Vous croyez que vous êtes libre ? C’est une illusion. La prison est à l’intérieur de votre crâne. Chaque fois que vous agissez d’une certaine façon, c’est parce que la dopamine vous motive à le faire. Et vous recommencez parce que les opioïdes et les cannabinoïdes renforcent votre attachement au même acte. Les neuromédiateurs vous commandent. Vous devenez dépendant. Donnez les outils à un rat, plantez-lui une électrode au bon endroit du cerveau et une pédale pour déclencher une excitation électrique, et il passera son temps à s’autostimuler. Il éprouvera une sensation de plaisir proche de l’orgasme et continuera indéfiniment, quitte à mourir, à bout de forces. C’est inscrit dans notre ADN de mammifère. Le succès est une drogue. Et comme toutes les drogues, on a envie de recommencer.
Patrick Bauwen (Le Jour du chien (French Edition))
Why didn’t it let us leave?” she said. “Far be it from me to interpret the motivations of an ancient sentient prison.” “Has that happened before? Does it… do that?” Not that I’d heard of. But then again, Ilyzath was universally regarded to be mysterious and horrible, and no one truly understood it. I ran my hand through my hair. “Maybe… it’s because of our magic. Perhaps it responded to us differently because of it.” Ancient and mystical and evil. Just like Ilyzath. “Perhaps,” Tisaanah said, but I could tell that she wasn’t satisfied with this answer. You escaped me once.
Carissa Broadbent (Children of Fallen Gods (The War of Lost Hearts, #2))
He was viscerally opposed to the Bengalis. I find such sentiments even today. It is incongruous to consider someone you want as an equal partner, at least in theory if not in practice, to fall in line and function as a second class citizen. When I asked him how he expected the majority of the population to accept the rule of the minority, he said some things were ordainded to be and that it was the fate of inferiors to be subservient to the superiors. It was clear that Col. Mujeeb was racially motivated. With such views prevailing even among the intelligentsia, how could one hope for the two Wings to remain united. It was clear that my Pakistan was dead.
Ikram Sehgal (Escape from Oblivion: The Story of a Pakistani Prisoner of War in India)