Quotes / Hellhole Prison

Audio Plays

Dude 1: Dude, check it out! A prison.
Buddy 1: Oh, buddy. Imagine being stuck in there.
Dude 2: I know, dude. That would suck.

—Buddy

Fan Works

"What was that place? That wasn't a prison, that was HELL!"

— Harry, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, about Azkaban

Film

Quite an accomplishment, someone building a triple-max slam in the belly of such a waste of a planet. No drop ship allowed within twenty kilometers. No escapes on record. The trick now is to try to stay alive. You're gonna have to try harder to get a jump on me. Mercs did it once, and these slam guards keep trying. What most call hell, I call home.

—Kyra on Crematoria, The Chronicles of Riddick (DVD virtual guide)

"Colonia Dignidad was a leading torture prison for the Chilean secret police. Hundreds of detainees were interrogated, killed and buried on the grounds. In almost 40 years, only 5 cell members managed to escape."

—Closing Title Card, The Colony (2016)

There's a reason why this prison is the worst hell on earth...Hope. Every man who has ventured here over the centuries has looked up to the light and imagined climbing to freedom. So easy. So simple. And like shipwrecked men turning to sea water from uncontrollable thirst, many have died trying. I learned here that there can be no true despair without hope.

—Bane on The Pit, The Dark Knight Rises

Literature

"Now listen to me, Conor Finn. The guard approaches. They will try to break you today. Watch carefully for trouble. A sly blade. A plank across the shins. Come through this day intact, and tonight I will teach you how to survive this hell."

—Linus Wynter, Airman

"They don't need walls and water to keep the prisoners in [Azkaban], not when they're trapped inside their own heads, incapable of a single cheerful thought. Most go mad within weeks."

— Remus Lupin, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

[to the Bishop of Dignes]:"Oh, the red coat, the ball on the ankle, a plank to sleep on, heat, cold, toil, the convicts, the thrashings, the double chain for nothing, the cell for one word; even sick and in bed, still the chain! Dogs, dogs are happier! Nineteen years! I am forty-six. Now there is the yellow passport. That is what it is like."

—Jean Valjean, Les Misérables

If you were sentenced to gaol, you did not go to an institution. No, you dug your own gaol with a spade provided to you by the Province of Maine. You dug it as wide and as deep as you could during the period between sunup and sundown. Then they gave you a couple of skins and a bucket, and down you went. Once down, the gaoler would bar the top of your hole, throw down some grain or maybe a piece of maggoty meat once or twice a week, and maybe there would be a dipperful of barley soup on Sunday night. You pissed in the bucket and you held up the same bucket for water when the gaoler came around at six in the morning. When it rained, you used the bucket to bail out your gaol-cell... unless, that is, you wanted to drown like a rat in a rainbarrel.

—Rita Hayworth And The Shawshank Redemption, on Maine's "prisons" in the early 1700s.

It stinks: shit, blood, puke. Stuff is on the floor, on the walls. Snow comes under the doors in winter. The vents make this noise all the time, and there's something about it — you can't block it out. I used to stuff toilet paper in my ears to try to stop myself from hearing it. I thought it was going to drive me nuts. It's twenty-three-hour lockdown with one hour a day, five days a week, in the kennel. That's what we call the exercise yard: thing is six feet wide, thirty feet long. I should know, I measured it myself for five years. Lights are on twenty-four/seven. There's no TV, no radio, just noise and white light. They don't even allow a man a toothbrush. They give you this useless fucking piece of plastic for your finger, but it's not worth a damn. I lost five teeth in there. They just fell out. When you get right down to it, the Max is a form of psychological torture. You know why you're in there, but not what you can do to get out again. And that's not the worst of it. You fuck up badly enough and they send you to the chair.

—Bill, on the Maine Supermax, The Unquiet

At the Andersonville camp, there is a great, stinking dread. The Confederates don't have enough food of their own, so they sure as hell aren't feeding their prisoners of war, and the prisoners who aren't wasting away are dying of diseases faster than they can be replaced. Here, the world smells like bloody shit and coal smoke. It reeks of body odor and piss and sweat.

South Georgia is nowhere to live by choice, and nowhere to die by starving.

—Wishbones, by Cherie Priest

Live-Action TV

The dungeons are also quite nice once you get past the first two levels, a stable for common criminals and private cells for useful highborns. How boring, I know. But then, you come to the Black Cells: no windows, no torches, just darkness and whatever you hear in there with you. Here we keep the greatest traitors until the king is ready for them, and with these... I often like to take my time. But I've heard rumors of an even lower, hidden level, Maegor's favorite. Once a man was taken there, he never saw the sun again nor heard a human voice, nor breathed a breath free of agonizing pain! Varys must know the way, but that overgrown girl pretends not to. Maybe he fears I'll make him a victim. Maybe I will...

—Joffrey Baratheon, Game of Thrones: History and Lore of Westeros — The Red Keep

Music

Oh, there is no escape, the sea is full of sharks
The tide takes you away, and smashes you on the rocks
The sun is shining but feel not today
It’s warmth, it’s dying and fading away

Devil’s Island, here I stay
Devil’s Island

—Megadeth, "Devil's Island"

Tabletop Games

Thus, the Tzimisce still speak excitedly of Tmu Tarakan, the Kingdom of Cockroaches, where prisoners ate a diet of their fellow inmates, slept on beds of decaying corpses, and drowned in a soup of their own entrails.

—Vampire: The Masquerade — Clanbook: Tzimisce (revised)

Rising from the centre of the River Reik is a black and red tower, pointing like a finger at the heavens, as if to remind Nulners of Sigmar’s wrath. Called the Iron Tower, it symbolizes Nulner justice at its worst. It is a dark place, a place where people go in and never come out.

—Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: Paths of the Damned — Forges of Nuln

Video Games

In the House of Upside Down
Cellar's top floor, attic's ground

In the House of Upside Down
Laughing cries and smiles frown

In the House of Upside Down
Found is lost and lost is found...

—The Little Sisters on Persephone Penal Colony, BioShock 2

Unlike some of the slams I'd been to, Butcher Bay had a detached efficiency. It could contain the cons, but it could never control them. So inside the Bay walls was chaos, desperation, madness, and death. The security turrets were a real crowd-pleaser — to everyone except the janitors.

—Riddick, Escape from Butcher Bay

"Hello! Did we enjoy our time with the CIA? Welcome to Durgesh! I apologize for the Spartan accommodations, but you have been a naughty little shit, haven't you, gallivanting about with the Golden Path..."

—Pagan Min, Far Cry 4

"I find you GUILTY and sentence you to [cardinal number] days in Southtown Correctional Facility! That may not be a 'long' time, but it will be HARD time! You'll be lucky if you survive..."

—Judge, Hard Time

Ever been to a Batarian prison? They don't trust you enough to sell you into slavery, that's where they send you. In there, you've got two choices: bash your head open on the wall or kill everyone between you and the exit.

—Zaeed Massani, Mass Effect 2

My first day on the island, I knew my life was over. I had reached the heart of darkness, a Stygian abyss, the supreme nexus of despair. I knew.

—Ranse Truman, The Suffering

Welcome to Durgesh Prison. I'm Pagan Min, and I've recorded this message to welcome all new tenants to this lonely little gulag. I'm confident that your stay will be a memorable one and I want you to know that if you have any complaints, any issues whatsoever, you can feel free to fuck yourself. That's right—just go on and fuck yourself. You're in Durgesh now.

—Pagan Min, Far Cry 4

"Feared as the highest security prison in all of Gavel, this towering stronghold has held the worst criminals within its walls for centuries. In recent years, however, rumors have spread that they have begun arresting innocent citizens..."

—Area description for the Lexdale Penitentiary, Wynncraft

Real Life

"[S]adism set the tone at Tucker. Men were beaten by wardens, by trusties, by one another. In the fields, whippings were regular and almost maniacally brutal. For overlooking some cucumbers he was supposed to pick, one inmate said he received 30 lashes on his bare buttocks. [...] Youthful inmates were beaten if they refused the advances of homosexual trusties. As punishment, or to force information from inmates, men were sometimes tortured with pliers, with hypodermic needles driven under fingernails and with the infamous "Tucker Telephone" — a battery-powered modification of a crank telephone with electrodes attached to the prisoners' toes and genitals. The device was put together by a former "inmate doctor" and usually administered in the prison hospital."

—Down on the Farm, Newsweek (20 February 1967)

"Male persons condemned to hard labour shall be employed in the most severe works; a cannon ball shall be chained to the feet of each such person; or the convicts shall be chained together two and two, whenever the kind of work in which they are employed will permit."

—1810 French Penal Code, article 15

First German: Oh Klaus! It's so good to see you again! How was it in the concentration camp?
Second German: Lovely. Breakfast in bed, our choice of coffee, tea, or hot cocoa, then sports, then a three course lunch. We had movies in the afternoon, and after dinner we milled around the courtyard with a smoke and a beer.
First German: Wow, I didn't know it was so nice. To think of the lies they spread about the places! When Mr. Meyer got out, he told me so many awful horror stories.
Second German: Mm. That's why he got sent back.

— Popular joke in Nazi Germany

"Three skeletons dug up at an Arkansas penal farm in 1968 led to the uncovering of a monstrous system in which a prison hospital served as torture chamber and a doctor as chief tormentor."

—Prison Legal News, Volume 16, p. 4

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