Vincent van Gogh, Prisoners Exercising (detail), 1890
“The poor are wise, more charitable, more kind, more sensitive than we are. In their eyes prison is a tragedy in a man’s life, a misfortune, a casuality, something that calls for sympathy in others. They speak of one who is in prison as of one who is ‘in trouble’ simply. It is the phrase they always use, and the expression has the perfect wisdom of love in it. With people of our own rank it is different. With us, prison makes a man a pariah.”
— Oscar Wilde, De Profundis (letter to Lord Alfred Douglas written in Reading Gaol, 1897)
David Prudhomme, Rébétiko (La mauvaise herbe), 2009
“Especially during the post [First World] War period, crime has evolved to a veritable occupation, therefore the now professional criminal considers his imprisonment a mere occupational hazard – much like the construction worker who could fall off a defective scaffolding, the miner who could encounter explosive gas, the radiologist who could suffer radiation burns, etc.”
— Petros Pikros, “In the innermost depths and Erebus of our prisons” (a piece of investigative journalism on Greek prisons, 1926)