Prison

A prison is a place in which individuals are physically confined and deprived of a range of personal freedoms.

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• At the risk of quoting Mephistopheles I repeat: Welcome to hell. A hell erected and maintained by human-governments, and blessed by black robed judges. A hell that allows you to see your loved ones, but not to touch them. A hell situated in America's boondocks, hundreds of miles away from most families. A white, rural hell, where most of the captives are black and urban. It is an American way of death.
  • Mumia Abu-Jamal, All Things Censored (2001, Seven Stories Press), pp. 55-56

• Stone Walls do not a Prison make, Nor Iron bars a Cage...
  • Richard Lovelace, "To Althea, From Prison" (1642)

• Might I but through my prison once a day
  Behold this maid: all corners else o' the earth
  Let liberty make use of; space enough
  Have I in such a prison.
  • William Shakespeare, The Tempest, I:2, Ferdinand

• And, for thou wast a spirit too delicate
  To act her earthy and abhorr'd commands,
  Refusing her grand hests, she did confine thee,
  By help of her more potent ministers
  And in her most unmitigable rage,
  Into a cloven pine; within which rift
  Imprison'd thou didst painfully remain
  A dozen years; within which space she died
  And left thee there; where thou didst vent thy groans
  As fast as mill-wheels strike.
  • William Shakespeare, The Tempest, II:2, Prospero, speaking to Ariel

• Happiness is a prison, Evey. Happiness is the most insidious prison of all.
  • Alan Moore, V for Vendetta

• I never saw sad men who looked
  With such a wistful eye
  Upon that little tent of blue
  We prisoners called the sky,
  And at every careless cloud that passed
  In happy freedom by.
  • Oscar Wilde, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898)

• Over the past three decades, the number of prison inmates in the United States has increased by more than 600%, leaving it the country with the highest incarceration rate in the world. During this time, incarceration has changed from a punishment reserved primarily for the most heinous offenders to a much greater range of crimes and a much larger segment of the population.
  • Devah Pager (23 March 2026), The Mark of a Criminal Record, 108, The American Journal of Sociology, pp. 937-975