Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin

To possess one’s own will in prison means surely to get into trouble.

In prison life there is no room for exercising one’s will.

Incarceration in a prison necessarily, fatally, destroys the energy of a man, and still more kills his will.

Now I was deeply impressed during my imprisonment by the fact that it is exactly these defects of human nature--each one of them--which the prison breeds in its inmates; and it is bound to breed them because it is a prison, and will breed…

Quite a life goes on, as in a beehive, between the seemingly isolated cells; only that life often takes such a character as to make it belong entirely to the domain of psychopathy.

But it is so contrary to human nature that its strict enforcement had to be abandoned.

But ‘once in prison, always in prison,’ such is the saying derived from experience.

When he was set free he had not a soul in the world to whom he might go to spend his old age. ‘Who will care to employ me?’ he said. ‘And what trade have I?

Altogether, the central prison at Clairvaux may be described as one of the best prisons in Europe.

Moreover, if the punishment for insubordination is very cruel, there is none of the flogging which still goes on in English prisons: such a punishment would be absolutely impossible in France.

The imprisoned man is not compelled to sleep on planks, or to have a mattress on alternate days only; the day he comes to the prison he gets a decent bed and retains it.

The mediæval spirit of revenge which still prevails in English prisons has long since been given up in France.

The fact is that if in a French central prison the inmates are perhaps more dependent upon the fancies and caprices of the governor and the warders than they seem to be in English prisons, the treatment of the prisoners is far more humane…

The fiction is that the law punishes the man by inflicting upon him a variety of physical and degrading hardships.

I thus realized that what was going on in our law courts was in reality a condemnation of quite innocent people to all sorts of hardships, in most cases even worse than those to which the condemned man himself is submitted.

And that meant evidently underfeeding, privations of all sorts, and the deterioration of the health of the wife and the children: weakened intellect, weakened energy and will.

And when I saw these children and realized what they had to expect in the future, I could not but continually ask myself: ‘Which of them is the worst criminal--this child or the judge who condemns every year hundreds of children to this…

Mere isolation, even if it were rigorously carried out--and it cannot be--would be of little avail; the whole atmosphere of every prison is an atmosphere of glorification of that sort of gambling in ‘clever strokes’ which constitutes the…

Anæmia, with its weakened energy and unwillingness to work, its enfeebled will, weakened intellect, and perverted imagination, is responsible for crime to an infinitely greater extent than plethora, and it is precisely this enemy of the…

What will become of these children after they have passed through that schooling and come out with their health ruined, their will annihilated, their energy weakened?

Already during my sojourn at Lyons I began to realize the awfully demoralising influence of the prisons upon the prisoners, which brought me later to condemn unconditionally the whole institution.

No, gentlemen--it was written in order to inspire him with hatred for our grand and beautiful institutions, in order only the better to infuse him with the venom of anarchism, in order to make of him only a more terrible enemy of…

There was nothing upon which to base the whole accusation.

Not a word was said about the explosions; and when one or two of the Lyons comrades wanted to have this point cleared up, they were bluntly told that they were not prosecuted for that, but for having belonged to the International--to which…

As is usual at such times, the fury of the poorer people turned especially against the places of amusement and debauch, which become only the more conspicuous in times of desolation and misery, as they impersonate for the worker the…