Scottish Prison Sieges Quotes

When Barlinnie's Prison doctor, Dr Danson, came to see Dingus, he turned in disgust at the state Dingus was left to lie in. Doctor Danson refused to treat him as he knew Dingus's injuries were life threatening, he told the top warden that Dingus would need to be rushed to Glasgow Royal Infirmary for emergency surgery. The screws in the seg block refused to listen to the doctor, they pushed and manhandled their own doctor out of Dingus's cell and threatened him with a severe beating if he made anything public about Dingus's injuries. ~ Stephen Richards

Before Mags became a household name across Scotland, it was during the mid Nineties when she became an avid anti-paedophile campaigner against paedophiles on the Raploch Estate, attracting media attention, even appearing on Robert Kilroy-Silk's morning TV show. At the height of her anti-paedophilic crusade, she led a howling mob of protesters to a hostel near her home where a known paedophile was staying. ~ Stephen Richards

Adrian (not sure if real Christian name?) was a PTI in Perth Prison before he came to work in the special units with us. Adrian was a gentleman, but he was also a very, very hard man that didn't take any shit. He is now working up in Inverness Prison, but I can tell you, this man can go for fun. I have witnessed him in action, I have been about all the diggers in Scotland ten times over and I would put this man up there with the best of them for a roll about with the prisoner. ~ Stephen Richards

I keep telling the screws over and over again, 'If you treat a young boy in prison like a dog, keep him in a cell that is like a cage and constantly beat him and bully him, that boy is going to grow up hating yous and the system.' The only thing on his mind will be revenge, maybe it is not revenge on the screws that so frequently bullied and tortured him, but in the boy's eyes he is getting revenge on the uniform, as it all means the same thing in the boy's or man's eyes. ~ Stephen Richards

You know, in a society where children just about have to seek parental permission to sit on Santa's knee, the word 'paedophile' should send more shivers up your spine than the word 'druggie'. ~ Stephen Richards

There is no getting away from the fact, he is one of only a few screws in the system who are the real McCoy. Anyone reading this book who has spent time in Scottish prisons will no doubt agree, this chimp is up for it just as much as the prisoners. I personally would love to see more screws like him, as he doesn't bother with all this shitty report piss. If you want to fight him, he comes into your cell, one-on-one, man-to-man. ~ Stephen Richards

Now if you want to look to the medical profession for a true hard bastard, there is none harder, in my opinion, than the man I will now name. I mean, 99.9 per cent of doctors would want to protect their pension and keep in with the in-crowd, not, though, this man amongst men. The star witness against the screws from Barlinnie was Doctor Simon Danson. ~ Stephen Richards

I was seeing more stars than Patrick Moore; he didn't half give me a sore fucking whack on the nut. ~ Stephen Richards

I got my lawyer to visit me in the jail. He couldn't believe the bruising over my body, so he pulled the governor and asked why I was covered in marks. The governor said to my lawyer that it was 'self-inflicted' and was caused by my 'running into walls'. That part was disproved because walls don't leave footprints all over your body. ~ Stephen Richards

Once the screws left, most of the six or seven boys who had been overpowered by the SAS were not in any fit state to move, never mind talk. In May 1988 Malkie and Sammo and one other boy, whose name escapes me right now, got a total of twenty-seven years between them for mobbing and rioting and assault. ~ Stephen Richards

What it like to sail?" she asked.
His gaze shifted, and he stared into the distance. "It's freedom. Like riding a powerful horse with a gait like silk. You speed over the waves, carried on the wind, held up over an unknowable depth of water beneath you, with the entire sky above. And that sky is a different color depending on where on earth you are. There are a thousand shades of blue. You can look up and know where you are, just by the color. And the stars at night - there's indescribable beauty in the stars, like a woman's eyes, flashing, shining... And yet, they are tools, enabling navigation, a map to follow..."
She stared at his profile as he spoke, at the scars that marred his brow and cheeks, the crooked line of his broken nose, the elegant, aristocratic line of his jaw, half-hidden under the shadow of stubble, and the soft, sensual curve of his mouth. She saw the sea in his eyes, smelled the wind, tasted the salt, and she felt her chest tighten with a longing to sail, to experience speed and adventure. Breathless, she felt the presence of the man in the portrait, the rogue, the bold captain. Her heart twisted as she imagined him in prison, beaten, chained, tormented to madness. He was still a prisoner, trapped inside the cage of his injured flesh, his damaged bones, his memories of unspeakable horrors.
What would it take to set him free? ~ Lecia Cornwall

Aberdeenshire's Peterhead jail housed the hardest, badest, meanest motherfucker prisoners in the Scottish prison system. So no one was surprised when the pressure pot jail finally erupted in to violence that has not been seen or equalled since. ~ Stephen Richards

You can do almost anything if you put your mind to it. Be it the perfect murder, robbing a bank or owning your own company. I don't go along with Prince Charles' maxim that everyone should know their place and limitations. ~ Stephen Richards

I waltzed into the hall with my escort of five screws like some rapper with his well-paid entourage. A fiendish looking, little bastard with blonde hair and a crooked nose came up to me and said, 'Okay, Holland, welcome to Shotts. Welcome to the man-eater! ~ Stephen Richards

Once the cons were in the cell, they'd pull razors or homemade daggers out and rob the YOs of their trainers, leather jackets or jewellery. You couldn't placate them; it would be akin to expecting not to be bitten from a Rhodesian Ridgeback whilst petting it! Bar L was full of rough, colourful and out-of-control junkies who wouldn't think twice about stabbing you or slashing you just to get what you had on your feet to pay for their next hit of smack. ~ Stephen Richards

The rush I got from crime was better than that of glue, drink or hash. I loved playing cat and mouse with the local coppers. He Who Dares Wins, the SAS motto, was very applicable to my life then. ~ Stephen Richards

This was my first time in Govan. You could smell and taste the thick smog in the air. The Blue Triangle was a new high-tech building, and it didn't look right standing there in front of older and more historical buildings. The Blue Triangle may have looked great from the outside, but once inside, to my horror, it was full of young teenage boys and girls full of deep and dark depression ~ Stephen Richards

No one was expecting the six-man team of elite SAS officers to storm the prison, but that is exactly what they did do. Hurling stun grenade and tear gas canisters, they entered the jail through a skylight before freeing the terrified prison warder. ~ Stephen Richards

The hours I would spend in the prison visiting room were among the most comforting of my life. They sped by, the only occasion at the Camp in which time seemed to move quickly. I could completely forget about the human stew that lay on the other side of the visiting room doors, and I carried that feeling with me for many hours after each visit was over. ~ Piper Kerman

If someone throws a banana at me in the street, I will go to prison because I will kill him. ~ Mario

Going to school is like going to prison ... you have about two weeks to establish your credibility, failing which you're either a punk or as good as dead. Depending on the school, some students can manage ot avoid those stark alternatives, but even at the best school, no teacher does. ~ Garret Keizer

The public expects sentences to be punitive but also rehabilitative; however, what we expect and what we get from our prisons are very different things. The lesson that our prison system teaches its residents is how to survive as a prisoner, not as a citizen - not a very constructive body of knowledge for us or the communities to which we return. ~ Piper Kerman

I've spent a lot of time in prisons, first doing legal work and later, teaching. ~ Peter Orner

A prison! heav'ns, I loath the hated name,
Famine's metropolis, the sink of shame,
A nauseous sepulchre, whose craving womb
Hourly inters poor mortals in its tomb;
By ev'ry plague and ev'ry ill possess'd,
Ev'n purgatory itself to thee 's a jest. ~ Tom Brown, Jr.

For lack of rules (which the undisciplined sector of the young call freedom) sets masters over one which are more tyrannical than the teachers and trainers familiar from childhood – these masters are the desires, when they have broken out of prison, so to speak. ~ Plutarch

You are all in jail. Each alone, solitary, with a heap of what he owns. You live in prison, die in prison. It is all I can see in your eyes – the walls, the walls! ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Changi became my university instead of my prison ... Among the inmates there were experts in all walks of life - the high and the low roads. I studied and absorbed everything I could from physics to counterfeiting, but most of all I learned the art of surviving. ~ James Clavell

If this were so; if the desert were 'home'; if our instincts were forged in the desert; to survive the rigours of the desert - then it is easier to understand why greener pastures pall on us; why possessions exhaust us, and why Pascal's imaginary man found his comfortable lodgings a prison. ~ Bruce Chatwin

I should never have expected loyalty from a Douglas," he spat out. He turned his back on her and went to the window. ~ Margaret Mallory

As it is not a settled question, you must clear your mind of the fancy with
which we all begin as children, that the institutions under which we live,
including our legal ways of distributing income and allowing people to own things, are natural, like the weather. They are not. Because they exist everywhere in our little world, we take it for granted that they have always existed and must always exist, and that they are self-acting. That is a dangerous mistake. They are in fact transient makeshifts; and many of them would not be obeyed, even by well-meaning people, if there were not a policeman within call and a prison within reach. They are being changed continually by Parliament, because we are never satisfied with them.... At the elections some candidates get votes by promising to make new laws or to get rid of old ones, and others by promising to keep things just as they are. This is impossible. Things will not stay as they are.

Changes that nobody ever believed possible take place in a few generations. Children nowadays think that spending nine years in school, oldage and widows' pensions, votes for women, and short-skirted ladies in Parliament or pleading in barristers' wigs in the courts are part of the order of Nature, and always were and ever shall be; but their great-grandmothers would have set down anyone who told them that such things were coming as mad, and anyone who wanted them to come as wicked. ~ George Bernard Shaw

A garden was the primitive prison, till man with Promethean felicity and boldness, luckily sinned himself out of it. ~ Charles Lamb

If we look at Houston, which is a very environmentally toxic place, we find that it has one of the highest levels of young men going to prison and also among the highest levels of illiteracy in the country. ~ Danny Glover

I sprinkle some flour on the dough and roll it out with the heavy, wooden rolling pin. Once it's the perfect size and thickness, I flip the rolling pin around and sing into the handle - American Idol style.

"Calling Gloriaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa . . ."

And then I turn around.

"AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!"

Without thinking, I bend my arm and throw the rolling pin like a tomahawk . . . straight at the head of the guy who's standing just inside the kitchen door.

The guy I didn't hear come in.

The guy who catches the hurling rolling pin without flinching - one-handed and cool as a gorgeous cucumber - just an inch from his perfect face.

He tilts his head to the left, looking around the rolling pin to meet my eyes with his soulful brown ones. "Nice toss."

Logan St. James.

Bodyguard. Totally badass. Sexiest guy I have ever seen - and that includes books, movies and TV, foreign and domestic. He's the perfect combo of boyishly could-go-to-my-school kind of handsome, mixed with dangerously hot and tantalizingly mysterious. If comic-book Superman, James Dean, Jason Bourne and some guy with the smoothest, most perfectly pitched, British-Scottish-esque, Wessconian-accented voice all melded together into one person, they would make Logan fucking St. James.

And I just tried to clock him with a baking tool - while wearing my Rick and Morty pajama short-shorts, a Winnie-the-Pooh T-shirt I've had sinc ~ Emma Chase

Scotland is one of my favourite places to perform: it's really something special. Scottish audiences are just so enthusiastic; their approach to dance music just feels similar to my own somehow. ~ Moby

I have spent more than 20 years in prison, then on one night I decided to surrender by signing all the terms and conditions of government. But suddenly I thought about Imam Hussain (as) and Karbala movement and Imam Hussain (as) gave me strength to stand for right of freedom and liberation and I did. ~ Nelson Mandela

The idea of putting old Browborough into prison for conduct which habit had made second nature to a large proportion of the House was distressing to Members of Parliament generally. ~ Anthony Trollope

Bless you, prison, for having been in my life! ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Not being appreciated for 40 years or something ... It feels like I was accused of something that I didn't do, which was breaking up the Beatles. That was like being somebody who is in prison without having done anything wrong. ~ Yoko Ono

Thanks to the fictional character named Fraser, in a well-loved Scottish novel, Alexander's existence on the grounds of Culloden had become its own bit of Hell. ~ L.L. Muir

In a system which denies the existence of basic human rights, fear tends to be the order of the day. The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear. Never let fear prevent you from doing right. ~ Aung San Suu Kyi

Saints and mystics spend their lives trying to escape the prison of the flesh; ~ Arthur Koestler

Your body is free but your heart is in prison. To release your heart, you simply reverse the process which locked it up. First you begin to listen for messages from your heart-messages you may have been ignoring since childhood. Next you must take the daring, risky step of expressing your heart in the outside world ... As you learn to live by heart, every choice you make will become another way of telling your story ... It is the way you were meant to exist. If you stop to listen, you'll realize that your heart has been telling you so all along. ~ Martha Beck

I have somewhere read that conscience not only sits as witness and judge within our bosoms, but also forms the prison of punishment. ~ Hosea Ballou

To-day, when the crisis calls you, will you go off and display your recitation and harp on, 'How cleverly I compose dialogues'? Nay, fellow man, make this your object, 'Look how I fail not to get what I will. Look how I escape what I will to avoid. Let death come and you shall know; bring me pains, prison, dishonour, condemnation.' This is the true field of display for a young man come from school. Leave those other trifles to other men; let no one ever hear you say a word on them, do not tolerate any compliments upon them; assume the air of being no one and of knowing nothing. Show that you know this only, how not to fail and how not to fall. ~ Epictetus

Those of us who hope to be their allies should not be surprised, if and when this day comes, that when those who have been locked up and locked out finally have to chance to speak and truly be heard, what we hear is rage. The rage may frighten us; it may remind us of riots, uprisings and buildings aflame. We may be tempted to control it or douse it with buckets of doubt, dismay or disbelief. But we should do no such thing. Instead, when a young man who was born in the ghetto and who knows little of life beyond the walls of his prison cell and the invisible cage that has become his life, turns to us in bewilderment and rage, we should do nothing more than look him in the eye and tell him the truth. ~ Michelle Alexander

I feel some nostalgia for the old red buses of the past that you could hop on and off at will. Nowadays the only way out of a bus is a door you can't open with your own hands. How smugly proud we are of our new-found freedoms in the West - always bragging about them and trying to export them further afield - and yet every year some sly little technological theft of our autonomy is surreptitiously introduced into everyday life. I mean, what better definition of prison is there than an enclosed space whose door you can't open with your own hands? ~ Glenn Haybittle

I got into one of the Scottish classical styles called piobaireachd, which is a very old music that started around the 1700s or something. I really got into this music. After that, I started to compose bagpipe music in my notations. Then I started building bagpipes by myself, and then I started to perform with the instrument myself in the 1980s. ~ Yoshi Wada

My characters push the limits of the envelope when it comes to passion, love, and lust. They can be as elegant and distinguished as Lizzie's Darcy, or as wild and unrelenting as Cathy's Heathcliff; sometimes all in one bold personality. I also believe there is a wider universal mosaic on our planet than mere black and white. My contemporary healer/surgeon in the novel 'Hobble' is half Native American (Mayan Mexican + Peruvian, plus Scottish) and his lover is African American (African + European + American Indian). My people see the world differently; they're often mixed race or of a race, color, or nationality not normally associated with nor depicted in romantic and erotic novels or films as central, positively sexual, and realistic. ~ Neale Sourna

But life, they said, means life. Dying inside.
The Devil was evil, mad, but I was the Devil's wife
which made me worse. I howled in my cell.
If the Devil is gone then how could this be hell? ~ Carol Ann Duffy

Sometimes we read Scripture about rejoicing or trusting and think, "Easy to say, but you're not facing what I am." But few people have faced conditions as dire as Habakkuk, with the impending destruction of his nation, family and friends, and way of life. His statement "I will be happy because of the God who delivers me" demonstrates that delighting in God isn't dependent on favorable circumstances. Happiness in God involves an act of will toward the God who's there, and who loves us, even in hunger, war and prison cells. ~ Randy Alcorn