Paranoia is an illness I contracted in institutions. It is not the reason for my sentences to reform school and prison. It is the effect, not the cause.

Imagine a thousand more such daily intrusions in your life, every hour and minute of every day, and you can grasp the source of this paranoia, this anger that could consume me at any moment if I lost control.

When they talk of ghosts of the dead who wander in the night with things still undone in life, they approximate my subjective experience of this life.

That is how prison is tearing me up inside. It hurts every day. Every day takes me further from my life.

The part of me which wanders through my mind and never sees or feels actual objects, but which lives in and moves through my passions and my emotions, experiences this world as a horrible nightmare.

I've wanted somehow to convey to you the sensations - the atmospheric pressure, you might say - of what it is to be seriously a long-term prisoner in an American prison.

As long as I am nothing but a ghost of the civil dead, I can do nothing.