Justice & Law Quote by Laurence Housman

Prosecution I have managed to avoid; but I have been arrested... reads like a man lightly tapping the bars of a cage to prove theyre real, then complaining when they swing open. Laurence Housman, a playwright and pointedly political craftsman, turns the machinery of the state into stage business: arrest, charge, police court, the procedural drumbeat of authority. Then he undercuts it with the pivot that matters - released "to my great regret" - a comic reversal that exposes how protest can be swallowed by bureaucratic anticlimax.

The intent is not thrill-seeking in any simple sense. Its a controlled dare. Housman is needling a system that uses intimidation without consequence, offering activists just enough punishment to remind them whos in charge, but not enough to make a martyr. By confessing he "always wanted to know what going to prison was like", he satirizes two things at once: the romantic aura that prison can acquire in radical circles, and the states power to deny even that symbolic victory by declining to prosecute.

Context sharpens the edge. Housman was involved in early 20th-century reform politics, including suffrage agitation; arrests were common, and imprisonment could become a badge that converted private conscience into public spectacle. His theatrical sensibility shows in the pacing: a legalistic set-up, a sudden punchline, then a sting. The subtext is that punishment is part of the social script - and when the state withholds it, it tries to make dissent feel unserious. Housman refuses that framing, turning release itself into an indictment.