“Prisons are the temples where devils learn to prey”

“Prisons are the temples where devils learn to prey” is an expression about the way confinement can teach and perpetuate hatred. It emerges as the narrator watches a prison gate close and recognizes hatred not as belonging to one person alone, but as shared among prisoners, guards, and the wider world.## From confinement to recognition The phrase follows the gate’s closure and the narrator’s recollection of hatred. The prison is figured not simply as a place that holds people, but as a place where predatory conduct is learned. Calling it a temple gives that process the force of an institution: confinement becomes an environment that instructs, rather than a neutral barrier that merely separates.

The recognition also resists assigning hatred to a single side. The narrator identifies it among the imprisoned men and the guards, then widens the thought to the world beyond them. In this movement, the expression connects an individual moment of imprisonment to a cycle sustained across the boundary between captive and captor.

The key and the argument

The passage’s companion image makes the act of locking a door consequential: turning the key is described as twisting fate. The key therefore stands for more than the mechanics of confinement; it marks a human choice that helps shape what follows. The expression’s claim is not only that prison contains people already formed by hatred, but that caging someone can close that person in with hatred and help perpetuate it.

Together, the temple and key images give the passage its progression: the closed gate prompts recognition, and recognition becomes an accusation about the effects of imprisonment. The expression distills that progression into a memorable moral argument, linking confinement, learned predation, and the possibility that punishment reproduces the hostility it is meant to contain.