Hell Is a Very Small Place Quotes

“Why do you think I am like this?” It didn’t really sound like a question; there was no regret, or sorrow, or genuine tinge of curiosity. I didn’t think he expected a complex answer in any case, as I’m pretty sure we both knew that a team of neuroscientists and psychologists could work on Mad Dog for a decade and still not have all of the answers. Instead, I removed a sheet of paper from my legal folder and wrote one quatrain from a poem by W.H. Auden:             I and the public know             What all schoolchildren learn,             Those to whom evil is done             Do evil in return. He received this carefully and spent a moment looking it over. For the tiniest fraction of a second his face relaxed and his eyes softened and he seemed to shrink into himself as he breathed in. Then it was over, and he turned away from me, a dismissal if I ever saw one. He crumpled up my note angrily and tossed it away onto the floor. It was the last time we ever spoke.”
― Jean Casella, Hell Is a Very Small Place: Voices from Solitary Confinement

“It’s not the physical things that you’re without that make it so hard to be incarcerated for life. It’s the fact that you’re helpless to take care of your family when they’re sick, to raise your children, to help in their times of struggle, and to give back to your community. Instead you’re a burden, a charity case, someone to pity. It strips you of your self-esteem and your self-respect.”
― Jean Casella, Hell Is a Very Small Place: Voices from Solitary Confinement

“What does it mean to share the world with millions of people in cages? How does the brute fact of those cages affect the meaning of the world, and of sharing, even for those of us not incarcerated? And at what point does the practice of caging threaten to destroy the very world that it claims to protect?”
― Jean Casella, Hell Is a Very Small Place: Voices from Solitary Confinement

“I’ve experienced times so difficult and felt boredom and loneliness to such a degree that it seemed to be a physical thing inside so thick it felt like it was choking me, trying to squeeze the sanity from my mind, the spirit from my soul, and the life from my body.”
― Jean Casella, Hell Is a Very Small Place: Voices from Solitary Confinement