- John 'Killer' Mears, Cell 4: [at the end of the prison break, walking into the guards' machine guns] I think I'll go get a little air.
- Richard Walters: I can't stand it Four. I can't stand it.
- John 'Killer' Mears, Cell 4: Buck up kid, I know it's tough your first night in.
- Richard Walters: I'm sick - my stomach... Yeah - I guess I'm yeller.
- John 'Killer' Mears, Cell 4: Yeller nothing. My belly's been turning over for an hour. They all feel the same way. Gee, its awful being in here when that guy's gonna burn.
- John 'Killer' Mears, Cell 4: How ya feeling, One?
- Berg - Cell 1: I got a pain, right near my heart. I hope I can stand up!
- Jackson - Cell 2: Don't you know there's two heavens, one for the white man and one for the black man. Why, if I could sneak up into that white man's heaven by accident or sump'n, the keepers up there'd say 'What you doin' in this heaven anyhow? Who told you to come here? Don't you know this ain't your place? Get on over in that black heaven. Over there by that garbage can. 'Fore you get sent to your black hell.'
- Mayer - Cell 3: What - they got a hell for the black folks too?
- Jackson - Cell 2: Sure. Sure we got a black hell. Did you'all think they gonna let us fry in that same fire as you white folks?
- Berg - Cell 1: You know I once read that when a man's about to die, only he was drowning in this story, he'd give anything, anything, to live for one more minute.
- [first title card]
- Title Card: "The Last Mile" is more than a story of prison and of the condemned. To me it is a story of those men within barred cells, crushed mentally, physically and spiritually between unrelenting forces of man-made laws and man-fixed death. And justly or unjustly found guilty, are they not the victims of man's imperfect conventions, upon which he has erected a social structure of doubtful security? What is society's responsibility for ever-increasing murders? What shall be done with the murderers? "The Last Mile" does not pretend to give an answer. Society must find its own solution. But murder on the heels of murder is *not* that solution. - Lewis E. Lawes, Warden, Sing Sing Prison, Ossining, New York