Penitentiary Quotes

First, you're sorry for invading my privacy for years, years before I even knew you existed. Second, you're sorry for kidnapping me, isolating, controlling me, and manipulating me. Third, you're sorry for lying to me, pretending you cared and oh yearh, marrying me. Fourth, listen carefully Tony, this is the big one...you're sorry for framing me for attempted murder, resulting in incarceration in a federal penitentiary." "I am deeply sorry for one and four. I did provide you with an alternative destination for number four. I am not proud of two, but three would never have happened without it. I am not, and never will be sorry for three. And, for the record, I never lied about or pretended to love you. I didn't realize it at first, but I have loved you since before you knew my name. And, you forgot our divorce. I am sincerely sorry for that also.

You were already in a prison. You've been in a prison all your life. Happiness is a prison, Evey. Happiness is the most insidious prison of all. Your lover lived in the penitentiary that we are all born into, and was forced to rake the dregs of that world for his living. He knew affection and tenderness but only briefly. Eventually, one of the other inmates stabbed him with a cutlass and he drowned upon his own blood. Is that it, Evey? Is that the happiness worth more than freedom? It's not an uncommon story, Evey. Many convicts meet with miserable ends. Your mother. Your father. Your lover. One by one, taken out behind the chemical sheds... and shot. All convicts, hunched and deformed by the smallness of their cells, the weight of their chains, the unfairness of their sentences. I didn't put you in a prison, Evey. I just showed you the bars.' 'You're wrong! It's just life, that's all! It's just how life is. It's what we've got to put up with. It's all we've got. What gives you the right to decide it's not good enough?' 'You're in a prison, Evey. You were born in a prison. You've been in a prison so long, you no longer believe there's a world outside. That's because you're afraid, Evey. You're afraid because you can feel freedom closing in upon you. You're afraid because freedom is terrifying. Don't back away from it, Evey. Part of you understands the truth even as part pretends not to. You were in a cell, Evey. They offered you a choice between the death of your principles and the death of your body. You said you'd rather die. You faced the fear of your own death and you were calm and still. The door of the cage is open, Evey. All that you feel is the wind from outside.

Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders. Knows remembers believes a corridor in a big long garbled cold echoing building of dark red brick sootbleakened by more chimneys than its own, set in a grassless cinderstrewnpacked compound surrounded by smoking factory purlieus and enclosed by ten food steel-and-wire fence like a penitentiary or a zoo, where in random erratic surges, with sparrowlike childtrebling, orphans in identical and uniform blue denim in and out of remembering but in knowing constant in the bleak walls, the bleak windows where in rain soot from the yearly adjacenting chimneys streaked like black tears.

Until you're grown-up they send you to reform school. After you're grown-up they send you to the penitentiary.

Strange? I don't think that word comes anywhere near it. My troops are on an overnight camp three hundred kilometres away from here. I had to sleep at the Santangelo penitentiary for pre-pubescent girls.

...'cause humans, above all, fear intelligence. how humans, scared out of their minds, gather whatever intelligence they can put their hands on and put it all in a central penitentiary named facts...

it seems a shame to have to sneak to get to the truth.To make the truth such a dirty old nasty thing.You gotta sneak to get to the truth, the truth is condemned.The truth is in the gas chamber.The truth has been in your stockyards.Your slaughterhouses.The truth has been in your reservations, building your railroads, emtying your garbage.The truth is in your ghettos.In your jails.In your young love,not in your courts or congress where the old set judgement on the young.What the hell do the old know about the young?They put a picture of old George on the dollar and tell you that he's your father, worship him.Look at the madness that goes on, you can't prove anything that happened yesterday.Now is the only thing that's real.Everyday, every reality is a new reality.Every new reality is a new horizon,a brand new experience of living.I got a note last night from a friend of mine.He writes in this note that he's afraid of what he might have to do in order to save his reality, as i save mine.You can't prove anything.There's nothing to prove.Every man judges himself.He knows what he is. You know what you are, as i know what i am,we all know what we are.Nobody can stand in judgement, they can play like they're standing in judgement.They can play like they stand in judgement and take you off and control the masses, with your human body.They can lock you up in penitentiaries and cages and put you in crosses like they did in the past,but it doesn't amount to anything. What they're doing is, they're only persecuting a reflection of themselves. They're persecuting what they can't stand to look at in themselves,the truth.

If you want a safe compass to guide you through life, and to banish all doubt as to the right way of looking at it, you cannot do better than accustom yourself to regard this world as a penitentiary... • If you accustom yourself to this view of life you will regulate your expectations accordingly, and cease to look upon all its disagreeable incidents, great and small, its sufferings, its worries, its misery, as anything unusual or irregular; nay, you will find that everything is as it should be, in a world where each of us pays the penalty of existence in his own peculiar way.

Huguet, on the other hand, insisted that prosecutors settle for nothing less than a lengthy sentence at the state penitentiary in Deer Lodge.

This happened in 1932, when the state penitentiary was still at Cold Mountain. And the electric chair was there, too, of course.

If the incision of our words amounts to nothing but a feeling, a slow motion, it will still cut a better swath than the factory model, the corporate model, the penitentiary model, which by my lights are one and the same.

Mark Twain describes how his friend Ralph Keeler introduced him at the start of a lecture: " 'I don't know anything about this man. At least I know only two things; one is, he hasn't been in the penitentiary, and the other is (after a pause, and almost sadly), I don't know why.

Don’t sell your land, don’t sell Grandmother Earth to the strip-mining outfits and the uranium companies. Don’t sell your water.” That kind of advice is a threat to the system and gets you into the penitentiary.

The evening sky was streaked with purple, the color of torn plums, and a light rain had started to fall when I came to the end of the blacktop road that cut through twenty miles of thick, almost impenetrable scrub oak and pine and stopped at the front gate of Angola penitentiary.

I refer to what is called mysterium iniquitatis, meaning, as I see it, that a crime in the final analysis remains inexplicable inasmuch as it cannot be fully traced back to biological, psychological and/or sociological factors. Totally explaining one’s crime would be tantamount to explaining away his or her guilt and to seeing in him or her not a free and responsible human being but a machine to be repaired. Even criminals themselves abhor this treatment and prefer to be held responsible for their deeds. From a convict serving his sentence in an Illinois penitentiary I received a letter in which he deplored that 'the criminal never has a chance to explain himself. He is offered a variety of excuses to choose from. Society is blamed and in many instances the blame is put on the victim.

They had chopped wood here too; then they were gone. Gone to the fields, the small towns, the cities – where they died. There was always news coming back to the quarter about someone who had been killed or who had been sent to prison for killing someone else: Snowball, stabbed to death in a nightclub in Port Allen; Claudee, killed by a woman in New Orleans; Smitty, sent to the state penitentiary for manslaughter. And there were others who did not go anywhere but simply died slower

When most of us hear the word cells, we think biology. I think penitentiary. (It's an occupational hazard.)

I am fairly certain that I was the first Seven Sisters grad to eat duck liver chased with a Diet Coke in the lobby of a federal penitentiary. Then again, you never know.

The Sex Criminal by Dr. Bertram Pollens, senior psychologist of the New York City penitentiary on Rikers Island and head of its clinic for sex offenders.3

And a thought occurred to me: the walls of the penitentiary guarding this pacifist were taller and more impenetrable than any of the fences at Y-12.

For the first time there appeared on earth kings, dictators, high priests, emperors, prime ministers, presidents, governors, mayors, generals, admirals, police chiefs, judges, lawyers, and jailers, along with dungeons, jails, penitentiaries, and concentration camps. Under the tutelage of the state, human beings learned for the first time how to bow, grovel, kneel, and kowtow. In many ways the rise of the state was the descent of the world from freedom to slavery.

But it’s not that simple. All the things I used to see as black and white have distorted into a mass of gray; complexities I never knew existed now consuming me.

This book is dedicated to anyone brave enough to embrace your issues… Courageous enough to dance with your demons. Here’s to the beautiful deformities in us all.

But, if you've decided to go out on a limb and kill one, for goodness' sake, be prepared. We all read, with dismay, the sad story of a good woman wronged in south Mississippi who took that option and made a complete mess of the entire thing. See, first she shot him. Well, she saw right off the bat that that was a mistake because then she had this enormous dead body to deal with. He was every bit as much trouble to her dead as he ever had been alive, and was getting more so all the time. So then, she made another snap decision to cut him up in pieces and dispose of him a hunk at a time. More poor planning. First, she didn't have the proper carving utensils on hand and hacking him up proved to be just a major chore, plus it made just this colossal mess on her off-white shag living room carpet. It's getting to be like the Cat in the Hat now, only Thing Two ain't showing up to help with the clean-up. She finally gets him into portable-size portions, and wouldn't you know it? Cheap trash bags. Can anything else possible go wrong for this poor woman? So, the lesson here is obvious--for want of a small chain saw, a roll of Visqueen and some genuine Hefty bags, she is in Parchman Penitentiary today instead of New Orleans, where she'd planned to go with her new boyfriend. Preparation is everything.

I remember when I was probably about ten years old I had a pen pal, and writing letters back and forth with him was one of my favorite things to do. His name was Steve and he lived in one of those huge mansions that's so big it has a name. It was called the Louisiana State Penitentiary, and he told me it was even bigger than the mayor's mansion. We'd send letters back and forth and he'd ask me to send him my favorite books and small pieces of metal or wood that were lying around and all the money I could find in my house. And I'd gather them all up and put cute little stickers of cats on the packages and send them away. It was so fun. Eventually we stopped writing because I moved to another city and he moved out to live on his own. He called it "solitary confinement." I was always so impressed by his vocabulary.

The Puffer Fish: Wherein the author flaunts his vocabulary. His father was IRA and his mother was Quebecois, and they had reliquished their mortal coils in the internecine conflagration that ended their conjoined separatist movement, IRA-Q. The appellation he was given by his progenitors was Ray O'Vaque ("Like the battery," he'd elucidate, with an adamantine stare that proscribed any mirth). In his years of incarceration, however, he had earned the sobriquet "Uncle Milty" for his piscine amatory habits. He had been emancipated from the penitentiary for three weeks, and now his restless peregrinations had conveyed him to this liminal place, seeking compurgation in the permafrost of the hyperborean tundra, which was an apt analogue of the permafrost in his heart. He insinuated himself into the caravansary with nugatory expectations, which were confirmed by the exiguous provisions for comfort. But then the bartender looked up from laving the begrimed bar, his eyes growing luminous as he ejactulated, "Milt!

The writer, without softening his vision, is obliged to capture or conjure readers. And this means any kind of reader. It means whatever is there. I used to think that it should be possible to write for some supposed elite, for the people who attend the universities and sometimes know how to read, but I have since found that though you may publish your stories in the Yale Review, if they are any good at all you are eventually going to get a letter from some old lady in California, or some inmate of the Federal Penitentiary, or the state in sane asylum, or the local poorhouse, telling you where you have failed to meet his needs. And his need of course is to be lifted up. There is something in us as story-tellers, and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance of restoration. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but he has forgotten the cost of it. His sense of evil is deluded or lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration. He has forgotten the price of truth, even in fiction.

Maybe we’re two mangled, jagged pieces who could click together, despite all the fires burning around us.

we may lead a horse to water we cannot make him drink; and that while we can shut a man up in a penitentiary we cannot make him penitent.

I don’t know anything about this man [Twain]. At least I know only two things; one is, he hasn’t been in the penitentiary, and the other is…I don’t know why.”[46]

Modern states with democratic forms of government dispense with hereditary leviathans, but they have not found a way to dispense with inequalities of wealth and power backed up by an enormously complex system of criminal justice. Yet for 30,000 years after takeoff, life went on without kings, queens, prime ministers, presidents, parliaments, congresses, cabinets, governors, mayors, police officers, sheriffs, marshals, generals, lawyers, bailiffs, judges, district attorneys, court clerks, patrol cars, paddy wagons, jails, and penitentiaries. How did our ancestors manage to leave home without them?

And so, there in the penitentiary, Juan's education began. He didn't want to be a puto weakling, so he worked hard at learning to read. His earthly body was locked up, but his mind was set free as a young eagle soaring through the heavens.

Build the prisons and they will commit the crimes.

Take a trip in my mind see all that I've seen, and you'd be called a beast, not a human being... Fuck it, cause there's not much I can do, there's no way out, my screams have no voice no matter how loud I shout... I could be called a low life, but life ain't as low as me. I'm in juvenile hall headed for the penitentiary. George Trevino, sixteen, "Who Am I?

Mitch’s father’s exclusive gated community had an extensive guard gate. In fact, it had two. It also had an electrified fence. And towers with armed guards. All things considered, few gated communities could be more exclusive than the Colorado State Penitentiary.

It is very odd to be standing in a locked room in the Penitentiary, speaking with a strange man about France and Italy and Germany. A travelling man. He must be a wanderer, like Jeremiah the peddler. But Jeremiah travelled to earn his bread, and these other sorts of men are rich enough already. They go on voyages because they are curious. They amble around the world and stare at things, they sail across the oceans as if there's nothing to it at all, and if it goes ill with them in one place they simply pick up and move along to another.

His life was absurd. He went all over the world accepting all kinds of bondage and escaping. He was roped to a chair. He escaped. He was chained to a ladder. He escaped. He was handcuffed, his legs were put in irons, he was tied up in a strait jacket and put in a locked cabinet. He escaped. He escaped from bank vaults, nailed-up barrels, sewn mailbags; he escaped from a zinc-lined Knabe piano case, a giant football, a galvanized iron boiler, a rolltop desk, a sausage skin. His escapes were mystifying because he never damaged or appeared to unlock what he escaped from. The screen was pulled away and there he stood disheveled but triumphant beside the inviolate container that was supposed to have contained him. He waved to the crowd. He escaped from a sealed milk can filled with water. He escaped from a Siberian exile van. From a Chinese torture crucifix. From a Hamburg penitentiary. From an English prison ship. From a Boston jail. He was chained to automobile tires, water wheels, cannon, and he escaped. He dove manacled from a bridge into the Mississippi, the Seine, the Mersey, and came up waving. He hung upside down and strait-jacketed from cranes, biplanes and the tops of buildings. He was dropped into the ocean padlocked in a diving suit fully weighted and not connected to an air supply, and he escaped. He was buried alive in a grave and could not escape, and had to be rescued. Hurriedly, they dug him out. The earth is too heavy, he said gasping. His nails bled. Soil fell from his eyes. He was drained of color and couldn't stand. His assistant threw up. Houdini wheezed and sputtered. He coughed blood. They cleaned him off and took him back to the hotel. Today, nearly fifty years since his death, the audience for escapes is even larger.

The freedoms that we have were purchased not just by those in uniform—and they definitely were—but also by those who took their lives into their hands, riding those Greyhound buses—the Freedom Riders, in the deep south, in the 1960s, who knew full well that they would be arrested, and they were, serving time, in the Mississippi State Penitentiary. Rosa Parks, getting from the back of the bus to the front of the bus. Peaceful, nonviolent protest.

I… I have trouble getting it to go down. Especially in stressful situations,” he mutters, giving me a guilty look. I swear to God, this kid is going to be the death of me. There’s something about his issues that just turns me the fuck on. He’s completely naked in front of me, shivering because he’s worried and it’s goddamn cold in here, just like I told him it would be, and his dick is hardening, his cheeks still fucking pink, lips all soft and pouty. I can’t take it.

Everything in the world bears witness of the use or misuse of man's inner talking. Negative inner talking, particularly evil and envious inner talking, are the breeding ground of the future battlefields and penitentiaries of the world. Through habit man has developed the secret affection for these negative inner conversations. Through them he justifies failure, criticizes his neighbors, gloats over the distress of others, and in general pours out his venom on all. Such misuse of the Word perpetuates the violence of the world.

The mere possibility that Packer might be set free sent the local press into fits of indignation. “Alfred Packer, known in Colorado as the Man-Eater from his habit of dining upon his associates, desires to leave the penitentiary, the diet there not agreeing with him,” wrote the wisecracking editor of one Boulder paper. “A lawyer has found what seems to be the necessary technicality. It is hoped that the lawyer will not succeed, but if he should, the only just recompense would be to fatten him and feed him to his carnivorous client.”10

The world needs people like us. The evil to balance out the good. The monsters under their beds, the fear. Fear is important, after all. It reminds us that we’re alive.

Stay back!” Hastings cried. “I am the dark in the dead of the night!

You’re ninety percent saner than Sin Wilder and no one’s calling him crazy. The guards aren’t going to come for you.

The Nights can’t shine without stars. Always aim to be the brightest one in our sky.

This was my favourite kind of weather. Raining carnage.

You can escape from just about anything… Anything but yourself.

Evil doesn’t exist. It’s only the reality of the world’s chaos. And we just keep spinning.

It’s like Lem wrote in his book… We all have good in us. We all house evil. The extent to which we practice it is what separates us from them.

If I’m your Want, then you’re my Need.

He might be the patient, but I’m the one who’s brainwashed. And I never want to wake from this debauchery.

I think in some way I wanted it to end, even if it meant my own destruction.” —Jeffrey Dahmer

What we like behind closed doors makes us who we are on the other side.

I am fairly certain that I was the first Seven Sisters grad to eat duck liver chased with a Diet Coke in the lobby of a federal penitentiary.

IN ALL THE YEARS I’ve spent here at Salton Sea State Penitentiary, I swear I never met a scarier man than Big Pete. 

I felt the starched walls of a pink cotton penitentiary closing in on me, and for the second time in my life I thought of running away.

Officer Kemper is dark, scary and unpredictable. I don’t understand how it’s possible for someone to go from tasing and handcuffing you in order to force sexual acts, to spooning you and bringing you eggs. It was basically breakfast in bed, and now I have a cage on my cock.

If you want a safe compass to guide you through life, and to banish all doubt as to the right way of looking at it, you cannot do better than accustom yourself to regard this world as a penitentiary... If you accustom yourself to this view of life you will regulate your expectations accordingly, and cease to look upon all its disagreeable incidents, great and small, its sufferings, its worries, its misery, as anything unusual or irregular; nay, you will find that everything is as it should be, in a world where each of us pays the penalty of existence in his own peculiar way.

The first day I came I remarked to Miss Maria that it looked a little like rain—and Miss Maria laughed. I said the road from the station was very pretty—and Miss Maria laughed. I said there seemed to be a few mosquitoes left yet—and Miss Maria laughed. I said that Prospect Point was as beautiful as ever—and Miss Maria laughed. If I were to say to Miss Maria, 'My father has hanged himself, my mother has taken poison, my brother is in the penitentiary, and I am in the last stages of consumption,' Miss Maria would laugh. She can't help it—she was born so; but is very sad and awful. "The

When he was four years old, his father had brought him home a tin box from the penitentiary. It was orange and had a picture of some peanut brittle on the outside of it and green letters that said, “A NUTTY SURPRISE!” When Enoch had opened it, a coiled piece of steel had sprung out at him and broken off the ends of his two front teeth. His life was full of so many happenings like that that it would seem he should have been more sensitive to his times of danger.

To whomever she speaks, African students on the shores of Lake Victoria, farmers in a Cuban sugar field, prisoners in an English penitentiary or factory workers in Uzbekistan, she brings the truth they learned in Ravensbruck: Jesus can turn loss into glory.

We may be certain that, by the logic of double-entry accounting, these two percent will reappear in other records than the election statistics, for instance in the registers of penitentiaries and penal labor camps, or in those places where God alone counts the victims.

Jesus said that whatever you did to the least of his people, you did to him, and the lifers in penitentiaries are the leastest people in this country. Just look to see whose budgets are being cut these days -- the old, the crazies, the children in Head Start -- and that's where Jesus will be.

The underworld, the penitentiary, symbol of the daring which overrides calculation and reflection, to which all means are good, which can dispense with the hypocrisy of formally constituted authority, hideous representative of the interests of the empty belly, the bloody, swift protest of hunger!

I'll never know why it was important to him that the couple (he said it later that he'd never seen them before) would take a picture of the whole Mr. Johnson back to Little Rock. He must have been tired of being crippled, as prisoners tire of penitentiary bars and the guilty tire of blame. The high topped shoes and the cane, his uncontrollable muscles and thick tongue, and the looks he suffered of either contempt or pity had simply worn him out, and for one afternoon, one part of an afternoon, he wanted no part of them. I understood and felt closer to him at that moment than ever before or since.

In 1959 Corrie was part of a group that visited Ravensbruck, which was then in East Germany, to honor Betsie and the 96,000 other women who died there. There Corrie learned that her own release had been part of a clerical error; one week later all women her age were taken to the gas chamber. When I heard Corrie speak in Darmstadt in 1968, she was 76, still traveling ceaselessly in obedience to Betsie’s certainty that they must “tell people.” Her work took her to 61 countries, including many “unreachable” ones on the other side of the Iron Curtain. To whomever she spoke—African students on the shores of Lake Victoria, farmers in a Cuban sugar field, prisoners in an English penitentiary, factory workers in Uzbekistan—she brought the truth the sisters learned in Ravensbruck: Jesus can turn loss into glory. John and I made some of those trips with her, the only way to catch this indefatigable woman long enough to

Adding to her frustration was the much more frequent attention being given to her gender. Throughout the twenties, Frances was hailed as “one of the most famous scenario writers” or “highest paid scenarist” and now The Big House was promoted in the Los Angeles Examiner under the headline “Woman Writes Film Plot of Penitentiary.

The human mind houses a rich depository of positive emotions. It also builds a penitentiary that contains cells of ugly emotions. Love and laughter are two of the most esteemed emotions. Hate and jealously are the two of the most odious emotions. Hate is the rawest of all emotions, making hatred the most difficult of all emotions to curb.

MEMORY believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders. Knows remembers believes a corridor in a big long garbled cold echoing building of dark red brick sootbleakened by more chimneys than its own, set in a grassless cinderstrewnpacked compound surrounded by smoking factory purlieus and enclosed by a ten foot steel-and-wire fence like a penitentiary or a zoo, where in random erratic surges, with sparrowlike childtrebling, orphans in identical and uniform blue denim in and out of remembering but in knowing constant as the bleak walls, the bleak windows where in rain soot from the yearly adjacenting chimneys streaked like black tears.

Time takes it all, whether you want it to or not. Time takes it all, time bears it away, and in the end there is only darkness. Sometimes we find others in that darkness, and sometimes we lose them there again. That’s all I know, except that this happened in 1932, when the state penitentiary was still at Cold Mountain. And the electric chair, of course.

You’re my greatest weakness…” he tells me with wonder in his tone. “But I think I want it. Knowing you’ll catch me makes me want to fall.

I’d rather be stupid and happy than hold the knowledge of the world and its misery.

The world isn’t black and white, especially not with you. You’re a prism of color, reflecting every beautiful thing back, and I never want to let that go.

I’m as innocent as a nun in a whorehouse,

Run free beastykins. Kill like it’s your birthday.

But just know, every moment I’m with you… is fireworks over the ocean.

Till no death that could ever part us.

May you forever hold each other’s hands through the chaos of life… Toss up your middle fingers, and tell the world to fuck off.

But his feelings for me… Those were fragments of truth scattered among the lies.

If mine is a king, then his is the dragon who burns down the castle.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which goes: “One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.

You don’t ask for much, do you, Rosa?” “I’d ask for the moon if you could steal it for me. But a cuff key is a good start.” He snorted a laugh.

those large brown eyes cut deep into my soul. She’d made a fool of me. Fucked me like a whore and for what? To see me shatter now before her?

If I’m doomed to love the sun from all the way down here on Earth, then at least give me wings so I can fly close enough to burn,

I take out my iPhone and open the app for Google maps. In the destination bar, I type in your name.

Moreover, the prison sentence, which is always computed in terms of time, is related to abstract quantification, evoking the rise of science and what is often referred to as the Age of Reason. We should keep in mind that this was precisely the historical period when the value of labor began to be calculated in terms of time and therefore compensated in another quantifiable way, by money. The computability of state punishment in terms of time—days, months, years—resonates with the role of labor-time as the basis for computing the value of capitalist commodities. Marxist theorists of punishment have noted that precisely the historical period during which the commodity form arose is the era during which penitentiary sentences emerged as the primary form of punishment.

think how nine-tenths, aye, I do not know but ninety-nine hundredths of all our vital powers are spent in a mere effort to get a living; or to heap together that which we cannot by any possibility take away. Take the life of the average workingman. Is that the life for which the human brain was intended and the human heart was made? Look at the factories scattered through our country. They are little better than penitentiaries.

...Rusche and Kirchheimer relate the different systems of punishment with the systems of production within which they operate: thus, in a slave economy, punitive mechanisms serve to provide an additional labour force -- and to constitute a body of 'civil' slaves in addition to those provided by war or trading; with feudalism, at a time when money and production were still at an early stage of development, we find a sudden increase in corporal punishments -- the body being in most cases the only property accessible; the penitentiary (the Hopital General, the Spinhuis or the Rasphuis), forced labour and the prison factory appear with the development of the mercantile economy. But the industrial system requires a free market in labour and, in the nineteenth century, the role of forced labour in the mechanisms of punishment diminishes accordingly and 'corrective' detention takes its place.

E-I-E-I-O. And on that farm he had a Cain.” He tossed a glance over his shoulder at me, a wicked glint in his eyes. “E-I-E-I-O. With a bitch-bitch here, and a bitch-bitch there. Here a bitch, there a bitch, everywhere a little bitch.

Boston loves the queers. North Dakota… not so much.” “I resent that,” I mutter. “Harley, how many bisexual men does your dad know?” He shoots me a look. “Trick question,” I reply, then mumble, “He doesn’t believe in bisexual…” “I rest my case.

The thing is, you have to stop and recognize when you’re in the good times. Force yourself not to take moments of bliss for granted. Because the memories are great, but they don’t hold a candle to the real thing, and you’ll always wish you could get this back.

At the time of my visit, there were only forty women in the Penitentiary. This speaks much for the superior moral training of the feebler sex. My chief object in visiting their department was to look at the celebrated murderess, Grace Marks, of whom I had heard a great deal, not only from the public papers, but from the gentleman who defended her upon her trial, and whose able pleading saved her from the gallows, on which her wretched accomplice closed his guilty career. —SUSANNA MOODIE, Life in the Clearings, 1853.

The name of the lesson is “Look What We Can Do to You Any Time We Fucking Want.” The point of the lesson is self-explanatory.The USA taught the world this lesson when it nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki. GloboCap (and the US military) taught it again when they invaded Iraq and destabilized the entire Greater Middle East. It is regularly taught in penitentiaries when the prisoners start to get a little too unruly and remember that they outnumber the guards. That’s where the “lockdown” concept originated. It isn’t medical terminology. It is penal institution terminology.

Darcy is everything to me,” he breathed. “She’s all I think about and all I want. I see so much good in her and she somehow brings out the best in me. And if you feel that you can’t keep this secret for us or like you have to tell the authorities about what’s going on between us, then I understand. Because you want to protect her as fiercely as I do. But even if we’re torn apart, even if I went to Darkmore Penitentiary and had to live out the rest of my days behind bars, I’d never regret a moment of it. Because my life was empty before I loved her. And parting us won’t change the way I feel for her.

She was it. The stars hadn’t made her for me, oh no. Nothing this pure would have been gifted to me. She was mine because we were drawn to the jagged pieces that our pasts had placed in us, corrupted parts that the stars had no hand in crafting. That was where we connected, within the wreckage of our truths.

The Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution had abolished slavery but allowed one major exception: slavery remained appropriate as punishment for a crime. In a landmark decision by the Virginia Supreme Court, Ruffin v. Commonwealth, issued at the height of Southern Redemption, the court put to rest any notion that convicts were legally distinguishable from slaves: For a time, during his service in the penitentiary, he is in a state of penal servitude to the State. He has, as a consequence of his crime, not only forfeited his liberty, but all his personal rights except those which the law in its humanity accords to him. He is for the time being a slave of the State. He is civiliter mortus; and his estate, if he has any, is administered like that of a dead man.19

With the rise of the state all of this was swept away. For the past five or six millenia, nine-tenths of all the people who ever lived did so as peasants or as members of some other servile caste or class. With the rise of the state, ordinary men seeking to use nature's bounty had to get someone else's permission and had to pay for it with taxes, tribute or extra labor. The weapons and techniques of war and organized aggression were taken away from them and turned over to specialist-soldiers and policemen controlled by military, religious, and civil bureaucrats. For the first time there appeared on earth kings, dictators, high priests, emperors, prime ministers, presidents, governors, mayors, generals, admirals, police chiefs, judges, lawyers, and jailers, along with dungeons, jails, penitentiaries, and concentration camps. Under the tutelage of the state, human beings learned for the first time how to bow, grovel, kneel, and kowtow. In many ways the rise of the state was the descent of the world from freedom to slavery.

The rustling noise was coming from the living room. The sound of drawers opening and closing. Hugging the wall, he inched steadily toward the sound of the intruder. He held his rifle in a firing position. Bolt back, safety off, ready to fire. A careful glance around the corner showed a shadowy figure dressed in black, holding a flashlight, snooping in drawers, violating his home. Quinton raised his rifle and carefully aimed. “What the hell are you doing in my house?” he demanded. He got off one shot as the invader ducked. Then, crawling, stumbling, and diving toward the open window the thief plunged outside head first, landing with a thud six feet down. Quinton was at the window now. A second shot winged the villain in the shoulder as he tried to rise. A third shot and he was down. Flat on his face, a bullet through his head. Dead. It is said those with the most money get the most justice. And that appeared to be true in Quinton’s case. It seems the fourteen-year-old intruder came from a family with some wealth, while Quinton did not. In fact, his lawyer wasn’t up to much and the end result was a hanging judge handed down a sentence of ten years. Tried and convicted of manslaughter. Sent to Kingston Penitentiary. Locked away.

Beginning in the fall of 2001, the U.S. military dropped flyers over Afghanistan offering bounties of between $5,000 and $25,000 for the names of men with ties to al Qaeda and the Taliban. “This is enough money to take care of your family, your village, your tribe, for the rest of your life,” one flyer read. (The average annual income in Afghanistan at the time was less than $300.) The flyers fell, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said, “like snowflakes in December in Chicago.” (Unlike many in Bush’s inner circle, Rumsfeld was a veteran; he served as a navy pilot in the 1950s.)82 As hundreds of men were rounded up abroad, the Bush administration considered where to put them. Taking over the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas, and reopening Alcatraz, closed since 1963, were both considered but rejected because, from Kansas or California, suspected terrorists would be able to appeal to American courts and under U.S. state and federal law. Diego Garcia, an island in the Indian Ocean, was rejected because it happened to be a British territory, and therefore subject to British law. In the end, the administration chose Guantánamo, a U.S. naval base on the southeastern end of Cuba. No part of either the United States or of Cuba, Guantánamo was one of the known world’s last no-man’s-lands. Bush administration lawyer John Yoo called it the “legal equivalent of outer space.

the bourgeoisie wanted to insert something more than just the negative law of “this is not yours” between the worker and the production apparatus he had in his hands. A supplementary code was needed that complements this law and gets it to work: the worker himself had to be moralized. When he is told: “You are only your labor-power and I have paid the market price for it,”‡ and when so much wealth is put in his hands, it is necessary to inject into the relationship between the worker and what he is working on a whole series of obligations and constraints that overlay the law of wages, which is apparently the simple law of the market.§ The wage contract must be accompanied by a coercion that is like its validity clause: the working class must be “regenerated,” “moralized.” Thus the transfer of the penitentiary takes place with one social class applying it to another: it is in this class relationship between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat that the condensed and remodeled penitentiary system begins to function; it will be a political instrument of the control and maintenance of relations of production. Fourth, something more is needed for this supplementary code to function effectively and for the delinquent actually to appear as a social enemy: the actual separation of delinquents from non-delinquents within those lower strata practicing illegalism. The great continuous mass of economico-political illegalism, going from common law crime to political revolt, must be broken up and the purely delinquent must be placed on one side, and those free of delinquency, who may be called non-delinquent, on the other. Thus, the bourgeoisie has no great wish to suppress delinquency.18 The main objective of the penal system is breaking this continuum of lower-class illegalism and the organization of a world of delinquency. There are two instruments for this. On the one hand, an ideological instrument: the theory of the delinquent as social enemy. This is no longer someone who struggles against the law, who wishes to evade power, but someone who is at war with every member of society. And the suddenly monstrous face the criminal assumes at the end of the eighteenth century, in literature and in penal theorists, corresponds to this need to break lower-class illegalism