Pamela Shropshire’s Reviews > Notes from a Dead House > Status Update

The reverse also happens: education sometimes goes along with such barbarity, such cynicism, that you loathe it, and however kind or well-disposed you may be, you can find neither excuses nor justification for it in your heart.

In prison it sometimes happened that you would know a man for several years and think he was a beast, not a man, and despise him. And suddenly a chance moment would come when his soul, on an involuntary impulse, would open up and you would see in it such riches, feeling, heart, such a clear understanding of his own and other’s sufferings, as if your own eyes had been opened…

[Theater] Imagine prison, fetters, unfreedom, long sad years ahead, a life as monotonous as drizzling rain on a dreary autumn day—and suddenly all these downtrodden and confined men are allowed for one little hour to let go, to have fun, to forget the oppressive dream, to set up a whole theater, and what a theater: to the pride and astonishment of the whole town, as if to say, see what kind of prisoners we are!

[On Christmas] Besides reverence for the great day, the prisoner unconsciously felt that by observing the holiday he was as if in contact with the whole world, that he was therefore not entirely an outcast, a lost man, a cut-off slice, that things in prison were the same as among other people.

The prisoner himself knows that he is a prisoner, an outcast, and he knows his place before his superior; but no brands, no fetters will make him forget that he is a human being. And since he is in fact, a human being, it follows that he must be treated as a human being. My God! Humane treatment may make a human being even of someone in whom the image of God has faded long ago.

Every convict feels that he is not at home, but as if on a visit. He looks at twenty years as if they were two, and is completely convinced that when he leaves prison at fifty-five he will be as fine as fellow as he is now at thirty-five.