Justice & Law Quote by Sam Sheppard

The line lands like a quiet correction to the way prison is supposed to work. A decade of incarceration is designed to sever: to turn family into an afterthought, to make love expensive in miles, minutes, paperwork. Sheppard’s sentence insists on the opposite. “Full ten years” has the bluntness of a lab note, almost defiantly procedural, as if he’s logging an experiment in endurance. The effect is to normalize what the system tries to make abnormal: sustained attachment.

The subtext is partly defensive. Sheppard doesn’t say he maintained a relationship; he says it was “already” deep and loving. That “already” reads like an answer to an unspoken accusation: that imprisonment must have produced distance, bitterness, suspicion. He preempts the cultural script that a jailed father becomes either a monster or a ghost. Instead, the relationship is treated as continuous, even if the setting is distorted.

Then there’s the triangulation of memory: “remembered our mother at those times.” It’s a small clause that reframes visiting from an act of dutiful loyalty into a ritual of shared grief and shared identity. Prison visits become a temporary household, a place where the absent parent is actively kept present. In a single sentence, Sheppard shifts the moral center away from the institution and back to the family, suggesting that punishment can confine a body without successfully dismantling a lineage.