Life & Wisdom Quote by Barbara Deming

Deming’s sentence is built like a utopian promise that keeps swerving into a warning. She starts with the bright, almost naïve cadence of revolutionary faith - “After the revolution” - then immediately tightens the screws with qualifiers: “let us hope,” “if by prisons we mean,” “as every place... now is bound to be experienced.” The hope is real, but it’s a disciplined hope, suspicious of slogans and allergic to easy abolitionist triumphalism.

Her key move is to redefine “prison” not as a building but as a lived experience: a place “experienced” as punishment, degradation, disappearance. That repetition of “experienced” matters. Deming is saying the carceral system isn’t just walls and locks; it’s the felt reality of being reduced, controlled, stripped of personhood. If that’s what a prison is, then a post-revolutionary society can’t keep the name and pretend it’s changed the thing. Calling something a “rehabilitation center” while reproducing the same psychic terror is still a prison, because it will still be “bound to be experienced” the same way.

The subtext is a critique of revolutions that swap uniforms and keep institutions. Deming, writing from a tradition of radical nonviolence and feminist politics, is wary of liberation movements that win power and then rationalize coercion as necessary, temporary, or for the greater good. Her syntax performs that skepticism: the sentence keeps refusing closure. The revolution she imagines isn’t proven by new rhetoric; it’s proven by whether society can finally stop needing places that people experience as cages.