“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
“The state has every right to incarcerate me, but it has no right to violate me.”— 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
“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
“To the man in the condemned cell, the world is a stage and he is the leading actor in a tragedy.”— Caryl Chessman
“When you're in a prison, and you're in there for years and years, you're not going to be reading Lord Byron or Shakespeare. You're going to be reading the easiest thing you can find.”— Charles S. Dutton