Anytime you cast a movie and you need someone famous in the lead part you're a prisoner of whoever happens to be famous in the six-month window in which you're trying to get a film financed.

When I go back to family reunions everybody goes 'Hey cousin! Hey Auntie!' And I'm like 'Okay I don't know you I have no idea who you are.' I am auntie and cousin for so many and even the ones in prison call me collect. And I'll be like 'Which of my family members are giving you this phone number?'

I believe that being an actress or being involved in a movie has to be a life experience otherwise why go for it? I have to change me and I have to learn things and I have to push me and my limits. By acting I find a freedom inside of a prison in a way.

Racism oppresses its victims but also binds the oppressors who sear their consciences with more and more lies until they become prisoners of those lies. They cannot face the truth of human equality because it reveals the horror of the injustices they commit.

Studies have shown that inmate participation in education vocational and job training prison work skills development drug abuse mental health and other treatment programs all reduce recidivism significantly.

A liberal education... frees a man from the prison-house of his class race time place background family and even his nation.

But the thing I felt most strongly about and put at the end of one of the prison diaries was education.

Poor people people of color - especially are much more likely to be found in prison than in institutions of higher education.

He who opens a school door closes a prison.

Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons or whether one wants to overturn them.