“The state has every right to incarcerate me, but it has no right to violate me.”— Jack Henry Abbott
“We are all doing time. The only difference is that some of us are in a place where we are not allowed to kid ourselves that we are not.”— Jack Henry Abbott
“I have been locked up for so long that I have forgotten what it is like to be a human being.”— Jack Henry Abbott
“I'm a state-raised convict. A veteran of the trenches of the American prison system.”— Jack Henry Abbott
“To the man in the condemned cell, the world is a stage and he is the leading actor in a tragedy.”— Caryl Chessman
“You run one time, you got yourself a set of chains. You run twice you got yourself two sets. You ain't gonna need no third set, 'cause you're gonna get your mind right.”— Donn Pearce
“Whether they're a CEO or a street person, they're people. They're mothers, they're daughters.”— Jean Harris
“Prison is a second-by-second assault on the soul, a day-to-day degradation of the self, an oppressive steel and brick embodiment of injustice.”— Breyten Breytenbach