I was in prison and I was an atheist. I didn't believe in anything.
At this point I hadn't yet gotten deep into the historic condition that negroes in this country are confronted with, but at that point in my prison studies I, I read, I studied Islam as a religion more so than as I later come to know it in its connection with the plight or problem of Negroes in this country.
While I was in prison, I was indulging in all types of vice, right within the prison. And I never was ostracized as much by the penal authorities while I was participating in all of the evils of the prison, as they tried to ostracize me after I became a Muslim.
The prison systems in this country actually are exploitative and they are not in any way rehabilitative.
They [prisons] are not designed to rehabilitate the - the inmate, though the, the public propaganda is that this is their function.
Most people who work in prison earn money through contraband.
[People] earn extra money [in prison] selling contraband, dope, and things of that sort to the inmates, and so that really it's an exploiter.
I had one warden tell me since I've been out, and I visited an inmate in prison right here in New York, Warden Fay up at Green Haven. I visited an inmate in prison and he told me that he didn't want anybody in there trying to spread this religion.
What you did to one, you did to all. So they couldn't have that type of religion being taught in the prison.
The religious philosophy that they had adopted, in my opinion, was the only thing and is the only thing that can remove the white from the mind of the white man and the negro from the mind of the negro. I have seen what Islam has done with our people, our people who had this feeling of negro - and it had a psychological effect of putting them in a mental prison.
I know [Arthur Koestler] fought in the Spanish Civil War. He was in prison, I think, in Spain and in Russia. He came to the United States; that's when I saw him in the mid-1940s.
We also had a beautiful feature where the writer used the story of two mentally ill relatives, one of whom killed his dad, to explore the history of how we deinstitutionalized the mentally ill, only to re-institutionalize them - but in jails and prisons. There's much more to come.
The sole relief I am asking for is to be released from military prison after serving six years of confinement as a person who did not intend to harm the interests of the United States or harm any service members.
I think that some of today's focus on freedom of information and trans rights have a tendency to focus on the actions of individuals and how they should be regulated by governments. However, I think it's important to remember that it is the institutions themselves - schools, tax collection services, banks, human resources decisions, health departments, police departments, prosecutors, courts, and prisons - where the most devastating and systemic problems occur today. The scale of these problems is simply unimaginable.
Chelsea Manning got thirty-five years in prison, while I'm still free.
The younger you are, the more likely you are to have grown up in a (mostly) lead-free environment, and that means you're less likely to have committed a felony or gotten sent to prison.
Because prison sentences in America tend to be long, de-incarceration lags falling crime rates by a fair amount, but eventually it does catch up.
While there's currently great turmoil, there is even greater opportunity for US to work together to transform our community. Far too many of our children are fatherless, far too many of our mothers are standing in the prison waiting rooms and far too many of our young people feel hopeless.
There are so many issues that impact women. When we talk about prison reform, for example, women were [once] sterilized in women's prisons. When they were giving birth, they were asked to sign paperwork but they weren't even completely conscious of what they were signing. That sounds like something that would never happen in America, but it was happening, not just in America, but in [California], one of the most progressive states in the United States.
The United States has more women and girls in prison than any other industrialized nation on earth.
Thousands of Americans have given their lives in Afghanistan and Iraq upholding their oaths and defending this nation. Chelsea Manning broke her oath and made it more likely that others would join the ranks of her fallen comrades. Her prison sentence may end in a few months' [time], but her dishonor will last forever.
I'd say the modern world has moved yet further away from me, and I don't think whether or not I am incarcerated has had much to say in this context. Living with your family changes you, for the better, and that would be the reason for the accelerated growth in the post-prison period, so to say.
Now the Thanksgiving meal is just so unnecessarily difficult. I mean even mashed potatoes - it's like the most difficult kind of, you know, medieval idea. All right, instead of just cooking them, why don't you spend, like, eight hours peeling them and then we'll have to mash them up. It feels like prison labor, really.
When globalisation means that many of the services that individual governments used to have direct power over are privatised, in education and health, even prison services, nonetheless national sovereignty still needs to be exercised.
Slavery remained in the Deep South by other names - in prison programs with charges over nothing and eternal debt that threatened every African-American in the South right up through World War II. And that was after killing three-quarters of a million people, destroying cities, and creating hostility that exists to this day over the the Confederate flag and the racism it symbolizes, all brewing out of bitterness over a war that didn't have to happen.
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