You are in jail for what seems to you an entirely innocuous event, or something barely a crime. You were jaywalking, you stole a loaf to feed your family, you said the wrong thing to the wrong person and they took offence. You’re not flawless, but you’re pretty far from being a murderer. You did a normal and reasonable thing and are being disproportionately punished for it.

You still want all the things you wanted before you went to jail of course. If anything, you want them more, because you’ve been denied them for so long. More than that, though, you want freedom, and you want justice for the wrong that has been done to you by trapping you here.

The guard has, for many years, been making clear that you will not get these things and you do not deserve these things. You are bad, society is better off without you, you belong in this prison, so that other, decent, people are kept safe from the likes of you. The guard isn’t actively abusive, in the sense that he doesn’t come in and beat you just for the sake of it, but he does ample violence to you when you try to escape.

Sometimes you’ve even successfully escaped, for short times, but you are always caught and brought back to your cell, and you are very much punished for your escape attempt, both with violence and with verbal shaming.

Then, one day, the judge who sentenced to this place comes to you, opens your cell door, and tells you this: He has seen that what you want is no crime. He loves you, and looks at you with compassion in his heart, and he wants all the best for you, and he recognises that really you all want the same things and you’re all in this together. You are free to go.

If you do anything short of trying to literally murder the judge, you are probably a better person than me.