Justice & Law Quote by Germaine Greer

Security is usually sold as freedom's quiet twin: the less you worry, the more you live. Greer flips that promise into a deadpan trap. The line works because it stages a perversely logical syllogism: if absolute security means total control, then the place designed to eliminate uncertainty is the maximum security prison. The punchline, "except for the imminent threat of release", is Greer at her most slyly sardonic, turning liberation into the new danger. Freedom isn't comforting; it's exposure.

The intent is less to romanticize incarceration than to ridicule the bourgeois fantasy of "feeling safe" as an unquestioned good. Greer is needling a culture that treats risk as moral failure and autonomy as a headache. In the prison, everything is prescribed: where you go, what you eat, who you see. No choices, no negotiations, no social improvisation. That rigid architecture of certainty is, in a warped sense, soothing. Release reintroduces the very things that make adulthood real: responsibility, desire, consequence, and the possibility of getting it wrong.

The subtext carries an activist's suspicion of institutions that promise protection while quietly demanding compliance. If you want a world with no threat, you end up endorsing cages - literal ones, or the softer cages of surveillance, paternalism, and self-censorship. Greer's irony lands because it exposes a cultural craving: not just safety from harm, but safety from freedom itself.