Anybody who would describe this apartment as a "prison cell" hasn't thought very long or very hard about the essential characteristics of prison, such as (in no particular order):
- You aren't free to leave, or to choose where to live. You can't run a normal business or work a normal job. You can't go to ordinary school.
- You are denied the ability to manage your own affairs, including administering your own finances, or even choosing what clothes to wear each day.
- You are separated from everybody you love and your only ability to communicate with those people is sporadic at best and through limited and heavily monitored channels.
- You lose all access to the internet and can no longer connect with your online friends, or learn new things by reading Wikipedia.
- The very limited privileges that you retain are revocable at the arbitrary discretion of state agents who consider you to be less than human.
- You are forced to deal with a range of individuals that you might not otherwise want to deal with, some of whom may be violent and may assault, rape, or kill you.
- If you are a member of certain minority groups, you can expect to be discriminated against in a broad variety of ways by the state, its agents, and other inmates. You may be unsure whether you will live through each day.
The apartment discussed in this topic has none of those features. Choosing to live in a small apartment does not mean you are in prison.
Why do I make this obvious point? In the United States and Canada, we have an extremely punitive penological system. Prison in these countries is a punishment so severe that it is arguably inhumane. And yet people in these countries want the punishments to be longer and harsher. And we casually act like prison is no big deal, and is comparable to living in a small apartment. If that is true,
of course prison sentences ought to longer and harder, right?
In my opinion, we are far too vindictive toward prisoners in the United States and Canada, and describing this apartment as a "prison cell" is contributing to that. This is an apartment building, not a prison.