"Bawling and nagging seem to be the only methods of enforcing discipline. We are consistently harried by rules and regulations that have no uniformity, but which are the invention of any individual guard who has the initiative or the imagination to bring them into being. It is a collective process, this harrying, yet so single in its application that I am made to feel guilty of being an individual whereas I should, in truth, be part of a machine. The idle-house gives me matter for thought. Ten years, surely, is a length of time that defies the imagination. It is impossible for me to define its length in so far as any length of time in the future can be reckoned. Ten years, I mull, is ten years. But then I stop there. When it passes, is it not like a dream? Then it is not ten years at all, but time that was part of my life and upon which I may look back with detached pain or joy. All I know, then, is that ten years is a long, long time, and that my problem is how to make the time pass swiftly.”
- James R. Winning, Behind These Walls. New York: Macmillan, 1933. p. 21-22