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.

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

One morning I woke up and was plunged into psychological shock. I had forgotten I was free.

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

My eyes, my brain seek out escape routes wherever I am sent.

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.

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