“One man's imagined community is another man's political prison.”

“Every man is a prisoner, and the greatest irony of all is to be the prisoner of another man.”

“One of the reasons that so many people of color and poor people are in prison is that the deindustrialization of the economy has led to the creation of new economies and the expansion of some old ones – I have already mentioned the drug trade and the market for sexual services. At the same time, though, there are any number of communities that more than welcome prisons as a source of employment. Communities even compete with one another to be the site where new prisons will be constructed because prisons create a significant number of relatively good jobs for their residents”

“I'm an educated man, the prisons I know are subtle ones.”

“I had never seen a prison, nor had I even imagined one, but there is a racial memory in man that instinctively knows of these things. The architecture of misery has an unmistakable look and feel about it.”

“one man's windchimes are another man's migraine”