Tool - Prison Sex (Meaning)

This song is not related to prison as an actual location or the type of abuse that happens in them.It's about cycles. It's about how vulnerable little kids are powerless to stop the abuse they receive, and how in their search for some sort of relief and empowerment they sometimes end up mimicking the only powerful 'role-model' they have ever known: the person who abused them. So the cycle continues, someone who was abused has the understandable desire to cast off the weight of those memories but they don't know how to go about it and they end up transferring that weight onto victims of their own.  It happened to the singer when he was a child so he is revealing it in this song.