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.

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.

I feel that if I ever did adjust to prison, I could by that alone never adjust to society.

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.

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

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.

Most important, you learn never to trust a man, even if he seems honest and sincere. You learn how men deceive themselves and how impossible it is to help them without injuring yourself.