Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin

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

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

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.

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…

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

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

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

The will of the prisoner must be killed, and it is killed.

Still less is there room for exercising one’s natural sympathies, everything being done to destroy free contact with those outside the prison and within it with whom the prisoner may have feelings of sympathy.

I could convince myself that as regards their effects upon the prisoners, and their results for society at large, the best ‘reformed’ prisons--whether cellular or not--are as bad as, or even worse, than the dirty lock-ups of old.

The offences he will commit after his release will be graver than those which first got him into trouble; and he is doomed to finish his life in a prison or in a hard-labour colony.

In the above-mentioned book I wrote that prisons are ‘universities of crime, maintained by the state.’ And now, thinking of it at fifteen years’ distance, in the light of my subsequent experience, I can only confirm that statement of mine.

For an active and independent man the restraint of liberty and activity is in itself so great a privation that all the remainder, all the petty miseries of prison life, are not worth speaking of.

And when spring comes, one feels more strongly than ever the want of liberty.

I took back from Clairvaux the best recollections of its governor; and altogether, while I was there, I more than once thought that, after all, men are often better than the institutions to which they belong.

But having no personal griefs, I can all the more freely, and most unconditionally condemn the institution itself, as a survival from the dark past, wrong in its principles, and a source of unfathomable evil to society.

What a nest of infection is every prison, and even a law court for its neighbourhood--for the people who live about them.

Dickens and Cruikshank have immortalized a few of these types; but they represent quite a world which gravitates round the law courts, and infuses its infection far and wide around them.

Quite an atmosphere of petty thefts, petty swindlings, spying and corruption of all sorts spreads like a blot of oil round every prison.

Every revolutionist meets a number of spies and agents provocateurs in his path, and I have had my fair share of them.

All governments spend considerable sums of money in maintaining this kind of reptile.

One who has had some experience of life and men soon discovers that there is about these creatures something which puts him on his guard.

Frankness in mutual intercourse is altogether the best way for bringing about proper relations between men.

Spies can imitate anything else but those ethics.

They often tell things that are true, but all depends upon the way a story is told.