“There was something about an old prison, even when declined into a mere remand centre, that brought comfort to the weariest soul, a sense of tried and tested purpose, a feeling of solidarity in a shifting world. Hither men had come to pay for their crimes, and paid, and hence returned to the society that had judged them, and thence more often than not returned again to this same spot in a cycle of crime and punishment, wrong and retribution, as endless and unremitting as all those other cycles of day and night, birth and death, Left and Right, Romantic and Classical, promotion and relegation, marriage and divorce, ingestion and defecation, permissiveness and puritanism, itching and scratching, whose centrifugal forces hold the timeless, limitless, meaningless universe together.”
Reginald Hill, Bones and Silence (courtesy of Mrs. T)