I had a naïve idea that if I could tell the story, people would be outraged and do something about conditions in the jails.

I was already a wreck when I went in, and prison nearly destroyed what little was left of me. I was worse when I came out than I was when I went in, and was not positively changed in any way.

At eighty-one, health club-lusting is as close as I'll ever come to getting laid again.

Prison experience puts distance between me and any person who hasn't been there, done that.

The fact that educated white women automatically assume that we have similar backgrounds annoys me. We don't. I feel like I'm in a certain kind of drag.

The only thing I remember writing in prison is a couple of poems for an inmate magazine they did once a year.

My friends in prison were mostly women more like myself: not historical figures who I did not relate to as peers, but hookers and addicts.