Jail Quotations

When I was younger, I didn't have the finer things in life. It was around me - the cars, the jewelry and all of that. But I didn't have it. So I did bad things to get what I wanted. Going to jail never crossed my mind. I wish it had. When I was locked up, my mother didn't support me because she couldn't accept who I was and where I was.

Of course it can be said of jails, too, that they try - by punishing the troublesome - to deter others. No doubt, in certain instances this deterrence actually works. But generally speaking it fails conspicuously.

Being incarcerated is truly very serious, and it has changed my life to such an extent that breaking the cycle has become my sole focus. Jail is definitely not cool. Education is.

If you can manipulate news, a judge can manipulate the law. A smart lawyer can keep a killer out of jail, a smart accountant can keep a thief from paying taxes, a smart reporter could ruin your reputation- unfairly.

They still don't want to admit to the world that this isn't the best and the fairest and most equal justice system. And that they are guilty of railroading people into jail. They don't want to, or never will, admit these things.

Nelson Mandela went to jail believing in violence, and 27 years later he and his colleagues had slowly and carefully honed the skills, the incredible skills, that they needed to turn one of the most vicious governments the world has known into a democracy. And they did it in a total devotion to non-violence.

With random urinalysis, there's a clear choice - either get high or go to jail.

To put someone in jail for using drugs in the privacy of his hotel room is just barbaric.

I happen to be pretty productive when I am in jail. When you are in jail, you have to spend more time with yourself.

Let me tell you something. Nobody goes to jail unless they want to. Unless they make themselves get caught. They don't have things organized.

Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail

I've come out of a small jail and entered a bigger one.

I will be really happy once I have done my jail time. I can start fresh.

Even after facing jail, Martin Luther King, Jr. courageously and boldly spoke out against racial inequality.

The murder of Robert Krentz - whose family had been ranching in Arizona since 1907 - by illegal alien drug dealers was the final straw for many Arizonans. But there are dozens and dozens of other citizens of our state who had been murdered by illegal aliens. Currently 95 illegal aliens are in Maricopa County jail for murder.

What is the price of justice? What is the price of justice? When bail is set unreasonably high, people are behind bars only because they are poor. Not because they're a danger or a flight risk - only because they are poor. They don't have money to get out of jail and they certainly don't have money to flee anywhere.

The smartest billionaires I know never finished high school. I got my degree and my doctorate on the street and an advanced degree in jail.

What I learned in jail is that I can't change. I can't live a different lifestyle - this is it. This is the life that they gave and this is the life that I made.

We need prisons because there are some hardcore criminals, but I never met a guy who has been in jail that came out with a smile on his face thinking, 'Right, that's it - now I am going to be good!'

Jail is much easier on people who have nothing.

Neil Armstrong was no Christopher Columbus. In most respects, he was better. Unlike the famous fifteenth century seafarer, Armstrong knew where he landed. He also spent his time in public service, not in jail, and his passing was marked by world-wide encomiums. He ended his days as a celebrated explorer rather than a royal inconvenience.

I went to jail 44 times. I've been beaten and left for dead on the side of the road fighting for freedom. . . . Yet Rosa Parks is better known in history than Ralph David Abernathy. Why is that?

Criminals look at identity theft and say only 1 in 700 criminals gets convicted of it. And they look at check forgery and they know that for every 1,400 forgers arrested, only about 123 get convicted and about 26 go to jail. So the rewards are great, but the risks are very slim. So that's one of the reasons that make it very popular.

So what really works? Treatments in jail do some good, but it's mostly too late: finding a family and a job or just growing older make most prisoners eventually give up crime.

They would almost throw the cops in jail when they tried to arrest me.

When they put me in jail, that's when they turned me into an activist. Up until the time I went to jail, I was just a comedian.

I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.

I am not brave enough to not pay my income tax and risk going to jail. But I can say rather freely what I want to say with my art.

The voice I have now, I got the first time I sang in a movement meeting, after I got out of jail... and I'd never heard it before in my life.

I've never been to jail. I've never been arrested. I've never been locked up.

Football is, after all, a wonderful way to get rid of your aggressions without going to jail for it.

I'm sorry I didn't go to jail for six months, then I know you could come to see me anytime you wanted to.

I'm gonna perform on one of the nights. Good clean fun; we're not going to jail. For the record.

But when we have families, when we have children, this gives us a purpose for being, to protect our children, to avoid going to jail because if I'm in jail, who looks after my children, who's there for my wife?.

Being in jail, it's humbled me in a way I never imagined.

We must stop criminalizing mental illness. It's a national tragedy and scandal that the L.A. County Jail is the biggest psychiatric facility in the United States.

Jail was a result of me not taking time for myself. So I was forced to take some time for myself.

There's a pattern when tours start - a pattern of infighting, of making up, of breaking up, of addiction. There's a pattern of going to jail. There's a pattern of passion for music.

If you want to know who your friends are, get yourself a jail sentence.

I love what I do. I love to capture the guy. I love to tell the victim 'Don't worry anymore. They're in jail.' And this is my way to heaven. This is my way to contribute to America what I know how to do best, and that's chase down the predator.

Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.

You can jail a Revolutionary, but you can't jail the Revolution.

We will not allow this day of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial to go without somebody going to jail.

Am I a criminal? The world knows I'm not a criminal. What are they trying to put me in jail for? You've lost common sense in this society because of religious fanaticism and dogma.

You know what an effective deterrent to crime is? Jail! And do you know what kind of criminal penalty actually makes people think twice about committing crimes the next time? The kind that actually comes out of some individual's pocket, not fines that come out of the corporate kitty.

I went to jail at 16 for stealing tires off Cadillacs. When I got out I said, Never again.

LL Cool J was a rapper-turned-actor, and I also relate to him because he was sort of a ladies' man and had a female fan base, but yet he's a positive dude. You never read about him getting into trouble or going to jail.

I saw an Elvis Presley movie Jailhouse Rock, where he gets out of jail and makes his own records and takes them to the radio stations himself. And then, he puts records in the store. After seeing that, I made records an put them in stores.

Federal prison, if you get any of it, you're going to have to do 85% of it. And the reason why I called it that is because I had a friend who got sent to the federal joint and his whole... it wasn't about him being in jail. He cried about the 85%.

When you go to jail, there's so much simple stuff missing. You just want some good toilet paper or a real toothbrush, a real blanket and a real bed to lay in.

Yanukovych has changed everything in Ukrainian jails - real criminals have been released, while representatives of the middle class and politically rebellious free-minded people have filled the prisons.

Facebook is not a physical country, but with 900 million users, its 'population' comes third after China and India. It may not be able to tax or jail its inhabitants, but its executives, programmers, and engineers do exercise a form of governance over people's online activities and identities.

I was going to go make a film in Greece. if they caught you with this much marijuana, they threw you in jail, no questions asked, and I was trying to stuff it in my deodorant bottles. I thought, what I am doing?

An athlete gets paid a lot of money. And someone who is after that, a thief, a mugger or someone who steals from people, they are taking a chance with the law that if they get caught, they are going to jail or face some other problem. In my case, you are going to get shot.

Every friend of freedom must be as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the United States into an armed camp, by the vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence.

In prison, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.

Through everything I've gone through- and I've been everywhere, at the top of the world, in jail, hung over drunk - I never gave up my dream of winning a gold medal in the Olympics.

I was kind of excited about going to jail the first time and I learnt some great dialogue.

It's such a tragedy that man endures in killing his brother and his own kind, putting him in jail and insane asylums, letting him lay out in the street.

Every single person in jail for a violent crime had a nightmare childhood.

There are not enough jails, not enough police, not enough courts to enforce a law not supported by the people.

I want to see somebody go to jail over the financial crisis and not just black, brown and poor whites over humbles and minor drug beefs.

I think there are too many people in jail for too long and for not necessarily good reasons.

If I was gonna go to jail, I don't want to go to jail for stealing a bottle of water. I'll steal that $20 million. At least then it was worth it.

As far as Iraq, the important thing is that the Taliban is gone in Afghanistan, three-quarters of the al-Qaida leadership is either dead or in jail, and we now have Saudi Arabia working with us, Pakistan working with us.

It's awfully easy to be in love in jail

Be thine own palace, or the world's thy jail.

It sounds kind of strange, but Jail time was almost a good experience for me.

But the single overwhelming reason why jails are bursting is longer sentences given for more crimes.

On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break.

When I was in jail, I was a lot of people's favorite person. I practically ran the jail. I had more freedom than the police.

I mean I've never been thrown in jail in New York or Los Angeles.

Clinton has more important things to worry about. He not only risks being destroyed historically, like Afghanistan's Buddha statues; he also could end up going to jail.

I shot a couple of movies in jail, but I was never in jail.

I want my kids to graduate from high school. But that's not enough. I also want them to go to college. Why? Because rich people's kids go to college. And if that's good enough for them, it's good enough for my kids. Because you know what? College graduates don't tend to go to jail as frequently as nongraduates.

If a slave is unwilling to go with his new master, he is whipped, or locked up in jail, until he consents to go, and promises not to run away during the year.

I remember the moment when it hit me. I was walking down Amsterdam Avenue on the Upper West Side, and it felt like I was literally walking out of a jail cell that I had been in. At that moment, I realized I could shave if I wanted. It was up to me and no one else.

People internalize, from the jail to student loan debt, to credit card debt, to unemployment to the whole collective. It manifests itself in many ways, in people's home lives, domestic stuff.

There is no higher claim to journalistic integrity than going to jail to protect a source.

Statistics say that I'm supposed to be in jail. And I'm not supposed to be alive.

Tom DeLay ought to go back to Houston where he can serve his jail sentence.

I've been speaking at churches for years, as well as juvenile jails, rehabs and hospitals, and I always talk about my faith. That is a declaration of my relationship with God

I tell the truth, and it has gotten me into a lot of trouble. My dad used to say to me, 'If you tell the truth all day long, you will end up in jail.'

Jail didn't make me find God, He's always been there. They can lock me up, but my spirit and my love can never be confined to prison walls.

Where is the justice of political power if it executes the murderer and jails the plunderer, and then itself marches upon neighboring lands, killing thousands and pillaging the very hills?

Jails and prisons are designed to break human beings, to convert the population into specimens in a zoo - obedient to our keepers, but dangerous to each other.

People don't understand that where I come from, everyone is either a convict, been in jail, been in a gang, is a hooligan of some sorts, but those are my brothers, my family and the people that I travel with. Those are the people that I roll with.

I don't have, you know, an 'overcoming addiction' story, other than the guitar itself, and I haven't overcome that. I don't have a jail time, you know, story, or any arrests.

I just spent 11 and a half months in a maximum-security jail, got shot five times, and was wrongly convicted of a crime I didn't commit.

In jail I was just like everybody else, I was sitting there praying, feeling caged.

Every time the liberals pass a bill - I don't care what it involves - they stick criminal sanctions on it. They don't feel there is any way people are going to keep a law unless they can put them in jail.

We'll try to cooperate fully with the IRS, because, as citizens, we feel a strong patriotic duty not to go to jail.

You have young men of color in many communities who are more likely to end up in jail or in the criminal justice system than they are in a good job or in college. And, you know, part of my job, that I can do, I think, without any potential conflicts, is to get at those root causes.

And unless you think there is a serious chance you're going to jail, don't listen to your lawyer.

I don't want to send them to jail. I want to send them to school.

Jail was probably the most exciting thing that's ever happened to me.

If it's illegal to rock and roll, throw my ass in jail!

Means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek.

If you seek violence, we will seek to put you in jail.

We're rapidly approaching a world comprised entirely of jail and shopping.