prison

I had heard of offices feeling like prisons, but in this case our prison felt, rather anticlimactically, like an office.

Expensive illogicalities and inefficiencies do not worry the monsters of American bureaucracy, and the taxpayers are enthusiastic and eager to spend fortunes in the name of fighting crime. Prison places cost the US taxpayer more than university places. The American belief that prisons are the best way to combat crime has led to an incarceration rate that is at least five times that of almost any industrialised nation. Overcrowding is endemic. Conditions are appalling, varying from windowless, sensory-deprived isolation to barren futile brutality.

No sun cream or condoms, just in case you__e looking at the lady-boys. There__ plenty of AIDS lingering about and every STD you can imagine.

The drug war is a total scam, prescription drugs kill 300K a year, while marijuana kills no one, but they spend billions/year 'fighting' it, because pot heads make for good little slaves to put into private prisons, owned by the banks who launder the drug money, and it's ALL DOCUMENTED.

Brightlord Adolin insisted. So long as you were in here, he wouldn't leave. We tried to stop him, but the man__ a prince. We can__ storming make him do anything, not even leave. He locked himself away in the cell and we just had to live with it.

I was most happy when pen and paper were taken from me and I was forbidden from doing anything. I had no anxiety about doing nothing by my own fault, my conscience was clear, and I was happy. This was when I was in prison.

In prison, you learn to count each day and each moment. You even count the bad 'meals' and the unbearable ones.

You can tell a lot about a country by its prisons. In hippy-dippy Socialist Sweden, rapists and murders (all three of them) while away their days making arts and crafts in what are essentially taxpayer-funded mental health clinics. The Swedes_ theory seems to be that a) anyone who commits such a crime must be crazy and b) with enough art therapy, the individual in question will soon become just another law-abiding, nude-sunbathing pot-smoker. In America, we think people in prison are either the victims of some terrible government conspiracy, the victims of __ociety___hatever that means__r heinous evildoers. And if they are heinous enough, we fry them with electricity, unless of course they find Jesus first. The Swedes, in a nutshell, are tolerant and forgiving, verging on the naïve; Americans are religious and vengeful, suspicious of their government, and suckers for tear-jerking tales of redemption.

That is just what life is when it is beautiful and happy - a game! Naturally, one can also do all kinds of other things with it, make a duty of it, or a battleground, or a prison, but that does not make it any prettier...

I like visiting people in prison. I can say whatever I want to them, and they can__ do anything about it.

The inmates made jokes about the chair, the way people always make jokes about things that frighten them but can't be gotten away from.

Often a man endures for several years, submits and suffers the cruellest punishments, and then suddenly breaks out over some minute trifle, almost nothing at all.

He's stubborn," Tux warned in a singsong tone."Stay out of this," Mark spat."And touchy," Tux added.

I also knew Dell was a good boy with bad friends. I was one of them, and I worried about leading him astray. But in those early years he made me feel cleaner, somehow; like all the shit we__ gone through wasn__ so bad. Like I could deal with it, so long as he was by my side. It had always been the way _ but still, I was sure Dell would disappear one day. I had nightmares about what I would do if they released him before me on good behaviour, if he should leave me behind in this fucked up limbo of our youth. Nightmares where if I didn__ hold on to him, those long legs would take him away somewhere better...

Prison is an expensive way of making bad people worse.

Please," Kendra said. "Think of all the lives that will be destroyed.""I have," Mark said. "Believe me, darling, I grasp all aspects of this, I really do. But how much has the public I'm protecting worried about me? My sanity, my happiness, my right to find peace?""They made no promises," Bracken said. "They are not preventing the end of the world. Those who know about your sacrifice appreciate you immeasurably. Your life may not be fair, but it is absolutely necessary.

When you spend your life taking care of mudmen, you can't help getting a little dirty yourself.

My fate is a prison. It's the only one of us who didn't need to inhabit one. I took your responsibility for those souls for you, even though their deaths are your fault. You should be forced to feel what it's like for someone to be imprisoned.