Politics & Power Quote by Jack Henry Abbott

Atmospheric pressure is a cunning metaphor for a system that crushes without needing to swing a fist. Abbott isn’t asking to be seen as a “criminal” in the tabloid sense; he’s trying to smuggle the reader past the moral checkpoint and into a bodily experience: the slow, constant force that changes your breathing, posture, even your sense of time. “Sensations” matters here because it’s a claim about knowledge. Courts deal in facts, guilt, and sentence length; he’s insisting the real sentence is environmental, an engineered climate.

The phrase “somehow to convey” does double work. It gestures toward the failure of language while also flattering the reader into collaboration: you, on the outside, are being invited to imagine what the state has made hard to imagine. Abbott’s rhetorical move is intimacy under duress. He offers not a confession but a translation project.

Context makes the line radioactive. Abbott became famous through his prison writing and correspondence (notably with Norman Mailer), then infamously re-entered public life after release and killed a man. That trajectory turns this metaphor into an argument about narrative power: the author asking for empathy is also someone many will want to deny it to. The subtext is a challenge to liberal sentimentality and punitive common sense alike. If you can be made to feel the pressure, you might start questioning the machinery producing it, even when the person describing it is morally compromised. That’s the uncomfortable point.