Justice & Law Quote by Jack Henry Abbott

Abbott flips the usual moral accounting: paranoia isn’t his personal flaw that explains away his crimes; it’s the damage invoice handed to him by the places meant to correct him. The line is engineered as a rebuttal to the tidy story respectable society prefers - that “bad people” land in reform school and prison because something was already broken inside them. Abbott insists on chronology. First came the institutions, then came the illness. That sequencing is the whole argument.

The rhetoric is blunt, almost legalistic: “not the reason… It is the effect, not the cause.” He’s pleading a case, but he’s also indicting a system that manufactures the very pathology it later claims to manage. “Contracted” is a deliberately clinical verb, as if paranoia were a contagious disease picked up through prolonged exposure. It reframes incarceration as an environment with predictable side effects: constant surveillance, arbitrary punishment, the daily necessity of reading threat in every glance. In that world, paranoia isn’t irrational; it’s adaptive.

The subtext is thornier. Abbott isn’t asking for absolution so much as recognition of complicity. If prisons create paranoid minds, then “rehabilitation” becomes a euphemism, and punishment becomes self-perpetuating infrastructure: it produces the behaviors that justify its expansion. Coming from a “criminal,” the sentence also dares the reader to separate credibility from respectability. Abbott’s authority is experiential, uncomfortable, and hard to dismiss without proving his point about how institutions erase the humanity of the people inside them.