Justice & Law Quote by Gregory Corso

Corso turns prison into a perverse kind of time machine, and the joke cuts because it isn’t really a joke. “Very fortunate” lands with Beat-era irony: a man describing incarceration as luck, as if the cell were a salon. The pivot is in the dates. He isn’t claiming his fellow inmates were literally born in 1910 or 1920; he’s saying they carried those decades inside them like contraband. Prison, in this view, is where America’s discarded eras go to rot - men shaped by earlier economic shocks, wars, and hard-knuckled street codes, warehoused alongside a poet who came of age in the postwar boom.

The line also smuggles in Corso’s aesthetic manifesto. The Beats prized the “authentic” voice, and Corso frames criminals and drifters as accidental archivists of a tougher, less sanitized vernacular. Calling it “fortunate” is a way to flip the moral hierarchy: the respectable world outside looks complacent; the caged world inside becomes the classroom, the library, the museum of lived experience.

Context matters: Corso’s own early imprisonments were formative, placing him in proximity to older, marginalized men and giving him the raw material - and the authority - the Beats traded on. The subtext is gratitude laced with indictment. If prison is where you meet the past, it’s because the present has decided certain people, and certain histories, are easier to lock away than to reckon with.