I don't believe anyone can go through the prison experience without being changed by it. The experience becomes part of your identity forever.

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.

I don't believe anyone can go through the prison experience without being changed by it. The experience becomes part of your identity forever.

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

I'm actually a lowlife. On the street at fifteen and also in jail for the first time at that age, and off and on the street until my mid-twenties.

I felt compelled to blow the whistle on the penal system, under the delusion that doing so might result in some change, or at least save a few women from the same fate. Eternally naïve, that's me.

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.