Life & Wisdom Quote by Barbara Deming

Deming’s sentence has the bluntness of a moral indictment, and it’s calibrated to refuse the usual reformist wiggle room. She doesn’t argue that prisons are “flawed” or “inhumane at times.” She claims the entire project of putting people away, as practiced so far, violates a baseline of human treatment. That phrase “to date” matters: it’s not naïve utopianism, it’s a historical charge. She’s saying: show me the prison system you’re proud of; I’ll show you the harm built into its design.

The line works by collapsing a lot of euphemisms. “Put people away” is the language of polite civic housekeeping, the way a society talks when it wants punishment without having to picture bodies. Deming yanks the euphemism back into view and makes “away” sound like what it is: removal, disappearance, a managed un-personing. “As no human being should ever be put away” reads like a human-rights absolute, not a policy preference. She’s drawing a boundary around what a decent society can do, even to the people it fears or despises.

The subtext is also strategic: Deming isn’t only defending prisoners; she’s indicting the public comfort that prisons purchase. “Our society” implicates the reader as beneficiary and accomplice. Coming from a writer associated with nonviolent radical politics and liberation movements, the context is a wider critique of institutional coercion: prisons aren’t an unfortunate tool, they’re a cultural habit of solving social problems by hiding them.