Justice & Law Quote by Eugene V. Debs

Debs isn’t pleading for sympathy; he’s detonating the polite fiction that freedom is an individual possession. The line is built like a drumbeat of solidarity: “while there is…” repeats as both a moral condition and a political indictment, each clause tightening the net until the final turn lands with courtroom clarity: if anyone is caged, liberty is counterfeit.

The specific intent is agitational. Debs is refusing the respectable reformer’s distance from “the lower class” and “the criminal element,” categories designed to isolate people and make punishment feel like public hygiene. By stepping into those labels - “I am in it,” “I am of it” - he short-circuits the usual middle-class escape hatch: I’m not like them. He makes the listener choose between shared fate and comfortable complicity.

The subtext is sharper than compassion. Debs implies that criminality is not an essence but a social product, and that prisons function less as justice than as containment for the disposable. His “I am not free” isn’t metaphorical melancholy; it’s a claim about political reality. A society that requires a permanent underclass and a permanent prison population can’t credibly call itself democratic, because its freedoms depend on someone else’s unfreedom.

Context matters: Debs spoke from within the labor wars and the expanding American carceral state, and he himself was imprisoned for opposing World War I. That biography gives the rhetoric its grit. He’s not performing allyship; he’s collapsing the boundary between citizen and condemned, arguing that the republic’s conscience is measured in bars and locks.