MEMOIRS FROM THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD
Fyodor Dostoevsky

...the right given to one man to inflict corporal punishment on another is one of the ulcers of society, one of the most powerful destructive agents of every germ and every budding attempt at civilization, the fundamental cause of its certain and irretrievable destruction. (237)

Tyranny is a habit; it has the capacity to develop and it does develop, in the end, into a disease. I maintain that the best of men may become coarsened and degraded by force of habit, to the level of a beast. Blood and power are intoxicants; callousness and perversity develop and grow... (237)

Some people think... that if a prisoner is well fed and well cared for, and everything is done according to the law, that is the end of the matter. This is another delusion. Every man, whoever he may be, and however low he may have fallen, requires, if only instinctively and unconsciously, that respect be given to his dignity as a human being. The prisoner is aware that he is a prisoner, an outcast, and he knows his position in respect to the authorities; but no brands, no fetters, can make him forget that he is a man. (134)

The dreams of the man who is caged and deprived of freedom are quite different from those of the man who is alive in the real sense. The free man has his hopes, of course (for a change in his lot, for instance, or the successful completion of an enterprise), but he lives and acts; real life with all its chances and changes wholly engrosses him. It is different for the prisoner. He also has, let us concede, a life--prison life, convict life; but whoever he is and for whatever term he has been confined, he is definitely and instinctively unable to accept his fate as something positive and final, as a part of real life. Every convict feels that he is not in his own home, but as it were on a visit. (115)



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