I would like to start a discussion about ending solitary confinement. I'd like to start a discussion about the removal of MO wings - an "MO" is a "Mental Observation" inmate - from Rikers Island, to be set up in mental health institutions. You can't put people in jail for having mental disorders.

If somebody is acting maladjusted - which means not happy to be at Rikers - the protocol, as I understand it and have been told by COs unofficially or officially, is to pepper spray that individual to sedate them.

I felt like there wasn't a political discourse. I felt like there was just one set of values, and any one set of values was wrong; that there should at least be room for conversation.

I think the big turning moment was when I joined the student political action club and started studying nonviolent civil disobedience in response to the Iraq War. The first anti-Bush protest in Atlanta was the first protest that I'd ever been to, and I helped organize the school walkout when I was a junior. It was a really solidifying moment.

I had a sense that my mother was struggling, when I was a kid, working twelve hour days, making $12,000 a year with two kids in a trailer park.

I think any person who goes to Rikers is criminalized, even just for visiting. I go back every week to see my friends in there. When you go to see a criminal, you are by relation a criminal and subject to be treated like one.

You can't put people in jail for having mental disorders. You can't do that, and they should not be held there. They need rehabilitative therapy.