Oz (TV Series)

The Routine (1997)

Harold Perrineau: Augustus Hill

Photos 

Quotes 

• Augustus Hill : Greaseball, cracker, mick, spic, kike, gook, nigger. Words. Words are weapons. I'd rather have a Mach 10 anytime. Some inmates say that violence is the worst thing we gotta face. For me, the worst thing is the great yawn. How do you fill day after dull ass day? We got these routines that are supposed to give our lives order and meaning. But I'm here to testify that I'm less afraid of getting shanked in my back than the routine. Cause the routine, man, the routine'll kill you.

• [last lines] 

  Augustus Hill : People kill to stay alive. That's as true in prison as out. I wonder why in here we fight so hard to stay alive. A man gets sentenced to 100 years, he really thinks if he exercises, gets all buff, stays diesel, he's gonna walk out? A judge says life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Without the possibility. Lifers. At some point they realize they ain't going nowhere. I seen it happen. A calm comes in their eyes. It's like they figured out something that the rest of us are never gonna see. They're suddenly free in a whole other kinda way, they're ready to die. And maybe they do what they can to help that shit along.

• Augustus Hill : Oz is where I live. Oz is where I will die, where most of us will die. What we were don't matter. What we are don't matter. What we become don't matter. Does it?

• [first lines] 

  Augustus Hill : Oz. That's the name on the street for the Oswald Maximum Security Penitentiary. Oz is retro. Oz is retribution. You wanna punish a man? Separate him from his family, separate him from himself, cage him up with his own kind.

• Augustus Hill : In Oz, the guards lock the cages and walk away and the predators rise, take control, and make the rules. In Em City, the guards are with us 24 hours a day. There's no privacy. Everybody sees what everybody's doing. Eyes everywhere. McManus' eyes. See, in Em City, retribution gives way to redemption. Timmy boy believes he can save every one of us, from each other, from ourselves, from the system that dumped us in here. Only thing he don't get is, you gotta want to be saved.

• Augustus Hill : What'd you do on the outside?

  Tobias Beecher : I was a lawyer.

  Augustus Hill : I hate lawyers almost as much as I hate cops.