A paraphrase of Stirner

Prison creates a society, a sort of community, and this society is not merely based on the sharing of a space. Prison is a specific sort of space defined in reference to its inhabitants, since it is only a prison because it is destined for prisoners, without whom it would be a mere building. What gives a common stamp to those who are brought together within its walls? Obviously the prison, since it is only by means of the prison that they are prisoners.

What, then, determines the manner of life of the prison society? The prison! What determines the prisoners’ intercourse? The prison too, perhaps? Certainly, they can enter into intercourse only as prisoners, only as far as the prison laws permit it; but that they themselves have intercourse, I with you, the prison cannot bring this to pass. On the contrary, it must have an eye to guarding against such egoistic, purely personal intercourse (and only in this form is it really intercourse between you and me). That we communally execute a job, run a machine, carry out any general task – the prison will indeed provide for this; but when I forget that I am a prisoner and engage in personal intercourse with you who likewise disregard it, this endangers the prison, and not only cannot be caused by it, but must not even be permitted. For this reason, the saintly and moral prison officials institute solitary confinement in order to cut off “demoralizing intercourse”. Imprisonment is the established and sacred condition, which one must not attempt to harm. The slightest push in that direction is punishable, as is every uprising against a sacred thing by which human beings are to be charmed and chained.
So the prison forms a society, a community (as in a community of labor), but no intercourse, no mutuality, no union. On the contrary, any real union between individuals within the prison bears within it the dangerous seeds of a “plot”, which under favorable circumstances might bear fruit.
One does not enter the prison voluntarily, nor does one remain in it voluntarily, but rather one cherishes the egoistic desire for freedom. Thus, it quickly becomes manifest here that personal intercourse is in a hostile relationship to prison society and tends toward

Willful Disobedience
Volume 4, number 3-4, Fall-Winter 2003