Daily Inspiration Quote by Catharine MacKinnon

MacKinnon’s line doesn’t treat imprisonment as a location so much as a legal and cultural downgrade. The core move is definitional: “prisoner” isn’t merely someone who broke a law; it’s a status category that quietly rewrites what counts as harm when it happens to you. Abuse doesn’t disappear behind bars, it gets reclassified - normalized through policy, institutional habit, and public indifference.

The intent is diagnostic and accusatory. MacKinnon is pointing to how power works when it can launder itself through procedure. The state doesn’t need to deny that violence occurs; it can narrow the threshold for what qualifies as violence against a prisoner. Strip searches become “security.” Isolation becomes “management.” Sexual coercion becomes “misconduct” in a system where consent is structurally compromised. Her phrasing - “reduced as part of the definition” - suggests something even harsher than neglect: the reduction is baked into the status itself. You don’t merely risk mistreatment; your mistreatment becomes more permissible.

The subtext is feminist and civil-rights minded: categories do political work. MacKinnon’s broader project has long been about how institutions define certain people (women, porn performers, harassment targets) such that injuries to them are discounted or rendered invisible. Here, the “group” language matters. Prisoners are treated as a class with fewer credible claims, fewer sympathetic audiences, and fewer enforceable boundaries.

Contextually, it lands amid decades of debate over mass incarceration, solitary confinement, and custodial sexual abuse - and the stubborn gap between rights on paper and rights that survive contact with a locked door.