"Now the Tombs, like the name says, are so horrible that they had to close it down. Today it doesn't exist and people go in the electric chair and all that"
About this Quote
Corso turns a civic horror into a deadpan punchline, and the laughter catches in your throat. "Now the Tombs, like the name says" is faux-common-sense logic: the jail is called the Tombs, so of course it's ghastly. That casual shrug is the trap. He uses the tone of a streetwise tour guide to smuggle in an indictment of how a city teaches its own brutality to feel normal, even inevitable.
The line is also a neat Beat-era move: compress institutions into slang and make bureaucracy sound like gossip. "They had to close it down" pretends there was accountability, a clean ending, a reformist moral. Then he punctures it immediately: "Today it doesn't exist" is technically true in the shallow sense (buildings get replaced), but the violence simply changes address. The kicker, "and people go in the electric chair and all that", is deliberately blasé, an "and so on" for state killing. Corso isn't minimizing; he's showing how the culture minimizes for him, how euphemism and administrative churn turn suffering into background noise.
Context matters: Corso came up poor, spent time in institutions, and wrote from inside the American machinery of punishment rather than observing it from a safe distance. The quote reads like overheard talk, but it's engineered: the childish simplicity, the abrupt pivots, the sloppy "all that" are rhetorical blades. He makes the reader feel the moral vertigo of a society that can demolish a notorious jail and still keep the chair plugged in.
The line is also a neat Beat-era move: compress institutions into slang and make bureaucracy sound like gossip. "They had to close it down" pretends there was accountability, a clean ending, a reformist moral. Then he punctures it immediately: "Today it doesn't exist" is technically true in the shallow sense (buildings get replaced), but the violence simply changes address. The kicker, "and people go in the electric chair and all that", is deliberately blasé, an "and so on" for state killing. Corso isn't minimizing; he's showing how the culture minimizes for him, how euphemism and administrative churn turn suffering into background noise.
Context matters: Corso came up poor, spent time in institutions, and wrote from inside the American machinery of punishment rather than observing it from a safe distance. The quote reads like overheard talk, but it's engineered: the childish simplicity, the abrupt pivots, the sloppy "all that" are rhetorical blades. He makes the reader feel the moral vertigo of a society that can demolish a notorious jail and still keep the chair plugged in.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
|---|
More Quotes by Gregory
Add to List
