#prison

If he's a poet, why's he in jail?" demanded a suspicious voice. Madam Chairwoman shrugged velvet shoulders. "Perhaps he writes free verse," she suggested cunningly. A stir of approval answered her. Mice are all for people being free, so that they too can be freed form their eternal task of cheering prisoners--so that they can stay snug at home, nibbling the family cheese, instead of sleeping out in damp straw on a diet of stale bread. ↗

— Margery Sharp

#prison #prison-abolition #diet

This is the most immediate fruit of exile, of uprooting: the prevalence of the unreal over the real. Everyone dreamed past and future dreams, of slavery and redemption, of improbable paradises, of equally mythical and improbable enemies; cosmic enemies, perverse and subtle, who pervade everything like the air. ↗

— Primo Levi

#exile #prisoner #dreams

If you made a better rat than a human, it’s not much to boast about, Peter. ↗

— J.K. Rowling

#human #peter-pettigrew #rat #prison

Pritkin kissed like he did everything else, straightforward, accepting no prisoners and with an intensity that left me breathless. It was hot and hard and desperate, like he was starving for it, and I opened my mouth and took it, because, God. ↗

— Karen Chance

#pritkin #prison

A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push. ↗

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

#door #him #imprisoned #inwards #long

Our lives are led, and our decisions made, within a network of needs and wants, some natural, some arising from the acts of others, some aggravated by the acts of the state. We are all bored, or threatened, or tantalized in differing degrees by a perilous world, some hostile people, and a not very sensitive government. ↗

— Carl Cohen

#boredom #coercion #experiment #government #justice

The first few hours in the cell were quite stimulating. I'd never been in a prison cell before and was quite enjoying the experience. ↗

— Tahir Shah

#experience

Imprisonment is the form of punishment which may detrimentally affect not only the offender but also his family and his employment and because of its duration it can seldom be kept from becoming general public knowledge. It [...] can have a lasting demoralising effect on the character and personality of the offender. The loss of liberty, tedium, regimentation [...] which prison life entails, have a greater potentiality than a whipping for destroying the offender's self-esteem and the integrity of his character and for changing, for the worse, his way of life. ↗

— P.W. Thirion

#family #human-rights #imprisonment #law #liberty

I'd watched too many schoolmates graduate into mental institutions, into group homes and jails, and I knew that locking people up was paranormal - against normal, not beside it. Locks didn't cure; they strangled. ↗

— Scott Westerfeld

#prison #freedom

We should never forget that everything Adolph Hitler did in Germany was "legal" and everything the Hungarian freedom fighers did in Hungary was "illegal." It was "illegal" to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler's Germany. ↗

— Martin Luther King Jr.

#germany #hitler #hungary #jews #peace